The Trouble with Tom (16 page)

As they lolled about and talked, Conway came to see Whitman as someone much like himself. They had come into their literary lives by accident, and against the odds. Indeed, Whitman had no books in his bedroom at all, and none to his name save a volume of Shakespeare and another of Homer. Yet he thirsted for knowledge, and haunted libraries. Both men had been deeply moved by Hicksite Quaker teachings. Though Walt himself was too exuberant and searching to be contained by any one religion, his parents had been Hicksites of the original stamp: Elias Hicks was still preaching when Walt was a child, and he remembered attending meetings and being deeply impressed by the man who opponents still labeled a Deist and a disciple of Tom Paine. "Others talk of Bibles, saints, churches, exhortations, vicarious atonements," he recalled later, "—the canons outside yourself and apart from man—Elias Hicks to the religion inside of every man's own nature." What Hicks practiced, Walt noted approvingly, was a "naked theology."

This was indeed what both men were now seeking for themselves. And moreover, both had been profoundly jarred loose from their social moorings by the moral crisis of slavery. Whitman told Conway that, as an old loyal Democratic editor and journalist, he'd left his party with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law—and was thus moved to write "Blood Money," which he considered his first real poem. It was the Fugitive Slave Law that fired Whitman's poetry and, Conway later wrote, "It was the Fugitive Slave Law that began the war. . . [it] brought slavery in its most odious form to the door of every family."

Soon enough it came to his own door. Conway found himself near abolitionism's white-hot center with the capture in Boston of Anthony Burns, an escaped Virginia slave whose return had been demanded by his owner. Bostonians were having none of it: antislavery mobs surrounded the federal courthouse where Burns was imprisoned, determined to block any attempt to send him home. The square was packed: Conway, accompanied by a new school acquaintance—a droll fellow named Oliver Wendell Holmes—found that they could not get into the courthouse. There was real impending violence and revolt in the air, and after Conway and Holmes left, one federal marshal was killed as the crowd tried to rush in. The situation only worsened from there: when Conway met with other antislavery activists the next day, he noticed editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson holding his cloak across his mouth, stanching the flow of blood. "He had been wounded," Conway realized, "by a cutlass on his lip and his neck."

Events were spinning out of control, and suspicion was everywhere: indeed, Holmes, with whom he had tried to run the courthouse gauntlet, had even been wary of Conway himself, describing him in private as "Virginia-born, with seventeen secesh cousins, father, and other relatives." He was right, of course, but when Southerners at Harvard held a meeting to support slaveholder Captain Suttle, Conway infuriated them by refusing to attend.

This was no hypothetical conflict to Conway:
he knew Suttle.
He had known the captain since childhood. And Conway also knew what an escaped slave looked like. Talk of reenslaving Burns, and mob talk of stringing up Suttle—into which one group of men had quietly tried to enlist Conway—all of this appalled him. Burns and Suttle were not symbols to him: they were not mere pawns in a national conflict. They were
human beings.
Suttle was on the verge of being assassinated, while Conway heard from those tending to Burns that the freed slave was also terrified, and wanted safe return to Virginia. Both men were now in fear for their lives, of being killed by those who claimed to know what was best for the country. And both sides now looked on Conway with suspicion.

Conway was brooding in Harvard Yard when he saw his mentor walking across the quadrangle.

"I am misunderstood," he told Emerson plainly.

"To be great," the philosopher reminded him, "is to be misunderstood."

They walked together across the yard, Conway pouring out how unsure he was of his beliefs, and even of his own direction in life. Emerson turned thoughtful and a little nostalgic as they walked through the grounds of his alma mater. He confided to Conway that afler graduation he himself had only aspired to be a professor of rhetoric. But some fates, some gifts, and some struggles are thrust upon one: old aspirations fall aside for new ones.

Conway did not know what to hope for anymore. He was as pained by his friends as by his opponents. At an abolitionist meeting on Independence Day, voices rose to a fever pitch with shouts of "Amen!" ringing out as Sojourner Truth and Thoreau spoke; Conway watched as William Lloyd Garrison ascended the podium, holding up a copy of the U.S. Constitution. It was, Garrison announced, a "covenant with death and agreement with hell." He set it afire and brandished the burning paper, roaring:
"Soperish all compromises with tyranny!"

Conway sickened with dread. Years earlier he had come to realize that the South was on the wrong path, but now he felt the North was too. To be against slavery was one thing, but to unilaterally abolish it implied force. Abolitionism was becoming the hellfire and brimstone that he had fled from before, only in a new guise, for both relied on demons and vengeance. "That day I distinctly realized that the antislavery cause was a religion," he later wrote. "Slavery was not death, and the South was not hell . . . I knew good people on both sides. I also believed that slavery was to be abolished by the union of all hearts and minds opposed to it." Conway was against the forcible deprivation of a fellow man's freedom, but he was also against violence—and he now lived in a country that no longer accepted that the one ethical belief must logically entail the other.

In their first walk together around Walden Pond, Thoreau had paused to pull up a peculiar blade of grass. He told Moncure to chew it.

"It is a little sharp," Thoreau explained, "but an experience."

The same could be said for Conway's own life by the late 1850s. He moved on from Harvard: graduated, married, had children, rose in the Unitarian ministry. But the same old problems dogged him. He was invited to a wealthy congregation in Washington, scourged them from the pulpit on the injustice of slavery, and was then invited to leave. He moved restlessly to Cincinnati, which proved a more genial place after the rancor of Washington. It was a city swelling with German immigrants and new Continental phiilosophies, where he could mingle with reverends and rabbis alike.

He found himself curiously drawn to one in particular, the undogmatic and inquisitive Rabbi Isaac Wise. Often invited to lecture and dine with various members of the synagogue, Conway slowly reached a startling realization: 'The majority of Rabbi Wise's synagogue were not believers in supernaturalism at all, but simple deists." Conway had, without realizing it, stumbled into the American birthplace of Reform Judaism. Many in Wise's temple had—like Emerson and Franklin years before—quietly come to the conclusion that a house of worship was a good and useful thing, if not an especially divine thing, and that its traditions and responsibilities served as a cultural and social glue for the community. But a brooding sky-God? Received truth and divine retribution? . . . Eh.

If he brought to their community meetings his exotic knowledge of the Transcendentalists of Concord, in return they pressed two newly translated German philosophers into his hands: Georg Hegel and David Strauss. These were a revelation to Conway, as much as—maybe more than—the Bible itself had ever been. Hegelian dialectic, with its argumentative clash of thesis and antithesis merging into synthesis, argued directly against received and immutable Truth: finding any truth was a
process
of argument, a changing and fleeting thing. 'We perceive in Nature tremendous contrasts, awful struggles," Strauss wrote, "but we discover that these do not disturb the stability and harmony of the whole,—that, on the contrary, they preserve it."

A reasonable-sounding premise, but it was one profoundly opposed to any religious dogma. What, then, was a minister nodding his head in agreement supposed to do? Well, not much, at first: how much would parishioners trouble themselves over German epistemology? But what Hegel's fine-sounding words
meant
soon became clear, when the latest shipment of British books reached Conway's hands. As an occasional editor and reviewer for a local magazine, he saw them before almost anyone else in Cincinnati. But one volume in this shipment stood above anything else. He read it, and ascended to his pulpit a changed man yet again. That December day in 1859, his parishioners got the shock of their religious lives.

"This formidable man . . ." he said, indicating a modest-looking octavo volume that none of them had heard of yet, "did not intend to give Dogmatic Christianity its deathblow; he meant to utter a simple theory of nature. But henceforth all temples not founded on the rock of natural science are on the sand where the angry tides are setting in." That tide took away much of his congregation, who were appalled by the new book he held in his hand—
The Origin of Specie
—and by its notion that everything, including humanity, was mutable. Conway's congregation fractured, with the traditionalists moving to a different building altogether.

But Darwin was only the beginning—or,, perhaps, the beginning of a clergyman's end. An even more explosive book had already been quietly pressed into the minister's hands by his Jewish friends.

It is a fact that if you want to be left alone on the subway, all you need to do is read a really beat-up old book. A new book won't work—quite the opposite. It must be old, and it needn't even be that wretched-looking. Sure, you can go the full distance and can have a ragged old Bible held together with rubber bands, and hold it in your lap where you stroke it and mutter to it like a pee—I have seen this—and I guarantee you will indeed have that seat on the A train all to yourself. But really, any old book is enough: no theatrics are needed. People don't trust old books, books with browned and yellowed pages, books with scuffed century-old covers . . . or, at least, they don't trust the sort of fellow who would read one on a train.

You think I am joking—but try it sometime.

I root through my backpack and pull out of my bag the shabbiest, oldest-looking book imaginable. Its covers were once a pleasant marbled green, but now worn down to a barklike wooden color; every single page inside is water-stained brown. It appears to have been left in the bottom of a pond, then dragged behind a cart, and finally thrown off a high cliff. There are bore holes in the cover so old that the worms who made them were long ago eaten by other worms. It is, in short, the most disreputable old book you or I have ever seen. I bought it from a man who mused that selling the thing saved him the trouble of throwing it away.

"I can well remember," the critic Augustine Birrell wrote a century ago, "when an asserted intimacy with the writings of Thomas Paine marked a man from his fellows and invested him in children's minds with a horrible fascination. The writings themselves were only seen in bookshops of an evil reputation, and, when hastily turned over with furtive glances, proved to be printed in small type and on villainous paper."

Villainous paper: yes. This paper is so degenerate that even the binding ran away from it years ago, until some man-and it
had
to be a man—had the bright notion of rebinding its spine with duct tape. It's actually a very neat rebinding job, as duct tape projects go. I run my finger along the silver tape, and then open the book carefully:

The Life of Thomas Paine
by
G.
Vale
New York: Published by the Author
Citizen of the World Office, No.
1
Bowery
1853

The subway begins to move forward, and—well, I have my seat all to myself.

This copy is not much to look at now, but it was Vale's book that fell into Moncure Conway's hands in Cincinnati over 140 years ago. His unlikely benefactor in this was none other than the salacious
Quaker City
novelist George Lippard, for Vale had been sitting on this Paine manuscript for years until Lippard's revival of interest in Paine revealed a real need for a new biography. "There are four lives of Mr. Thomas Paine now extant," Vale's book begins, "but none in print in the United States." The first biography had been penned by a hired character assassin on the British government's payroll, and the only American biography had been written over forty years earlier by a man Paine himself had derided as an "idiot" and an "unprincipled bully." To which his biographer responded, "
Likewise
," for about another hundred pages.

The lecherous brandy-guzzling bomb-throwing God-hating pervert described in hostile biographies was not the man Conway found in the volumes his freethinking friends in Cincinnati were reading, nor in the eyewitness accounts Gilbert Vale had collected. Even Paine's demise had a strangely legendary feel of truth lost to allegory, what with his bones having been dug up by an admirer and then disappearing somewhere in England. Some children were taught that Paine's bones had been turned into shirt buttons, now scattered and doomed to roam the globe with their multitudes of owners. "I discovered that in his legend," Conway mused, "there were traces of the old folktales of the Wandering Jew."

Conway's greatest work now lay in uncovering the man he discovered in these books, and in tracking down his eventual fate. For the Paine he discovered was a one-time lay preacher who had come to distrust religion; a rationalist who demanded proof before tradition; a principled exile who had left behind exasperated friends from both sides of a mighty battle over freedom. Vale's book is not much to look at now, but it is easy to see why Conway was so moved by it. In the story of Paine, the minister had discovered his own.