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Note on the phrase "ceasing to hold slaves."  Some people have asked me what the italicized phrase "ceasing to hold slaves" means, for Massachusetts was not a slave state. Thoreau's use of the phrase confuses them. But I think Thoreau was dead serious. Though there were no actual slaves living in Massachusetts, Thoreau called Massachusetts (and by implication all the north) as a "slave State," for, he said, a hundred thousand of its merchants and farmers traded with slaveholders --and thus were, in effect, partners with slavery. He also wrote that "there are perhaps a million slaves in Massachusetts"--this was the state's entire population. He called all of them slaves because they continued to fail to act to force their state to cease supporting slavery and its buttresses, such as the Fugitive Slave Law. He exhorted, “Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority … is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight.” (See, his essays "Civil Disobedience" and "Slavery in Massachusetts!")

 

Austin Meredith <Kouroo@brown.edu> responded to my request for comments on this phrase:

<<One general thought I have is that in the days of enslavement, slavery was a live metaphor. The past is a foreign country -- back then, it wasn't like today. . . . One feature of the situation back then was, the metaphor of enslavement was being accessed and deployed in virtually ever conceivable context. For instance, in a crusade against tobacco and the filth of it --the  constant spitting on floors for instance-- a crusader could and would readily invoke the spectre of being "enslaved" to the sot weed. Ministers regularly exhorted businessmen not to fall victim to the abundant daytime sexual temptations downtown . . .  by asking  them not to become "enslaved," rather than by suggesting as a minister would today that such a respectable family man should not become a "sex addict." Even the casual use of coffee and tea could be, and was, described  in terms of enslavement to a substance.

So, in a context in which there was abundant use of the metaphor of slavery, Thoreau weighs in with what I would call a "mainline" use of the metaphor.

The mainline connection was, there were people back then who were refusing  to wear anything fashioned of cotton, because cotton was a crop being grown  by the use of slave labor. When Friend Elias Hicks lay dying, for instance,  someone threw a cotton quilt over him, and he was seen picking at it and  picking at it, until he got it to slide off him and onto the floor. He couldn't stand the idea of dying with cotton fabric touching him, because of the sad history of that cotton. The growing of cotton on slave plantations down south had created, in Massachusetts, what was known as the "Cotton Whig." The "Cotton Whig" was a Massachusetts businessman or banker who was just apeshit in his indignation against the moral righteousness of  the antislavery people. This Massachusetts businessman or banker was declaiming against, actually rioting in the streets against, objectionable people such as William Lloyd Garrison, who were objecting to the peculiar institution of human chattel bondage. Such agitation might hurt them in the pocketbook. They had mills full of immigrant white labor up north, working eighteen hours a day six days a week for the sheerest pittance in the looming of cotton cloth from the products of those slave plantations down south. The black slave down south was creating a white slave up north, the factory laborer responding to the factory whistle.

And our federal government was insisting that the people of Massachusetts could not follow their own moral guidance. When faced with a runaway black slave from down South, rather than follow the precepts of scripture --feed  the hungry, treat the ill, help the unfortunate, etc.-- they were supposed  to turn this man or woman in to be seized by a bounty hunter and for a $10 reward from the federal government be returned to slavery, with the prospect of that person being tortured to death by whipping or whatever upon his or her return to enslavement. If they resisted this, their  property could be seized -- that was the Fugitive Slave Act, which, it was said, was reducing the people of Massachusetts to being also, in an extended sense, the slaves of slavemasters. White slaves. A slave is one who must do another's bidding, and here these free Massachusetts citizens  were being reduced in fear to doing the federal government's bidding -- in disregard of a Higher Law to which instead they owed their total devotion!

Today we are exercised over creeping commercialization. For instance, we are presently concerned that a new industry will spring up, offering  third-world kidneys and other organs for cash to the highest first-world bidders. In capitalism, the constant tendency is for everything to be  reduced to a cash commodity. We start by selling sex and now we're selling our embryos, we're renting our wombs, etc. That's always generating resistance. But back then, there was the same sort of resistance, of  repugnance, that we're seeing today. Where today, we might be put off by a news story about the gradual extension of the power of money into, say, stem cells from aborted fetuses, back in Thoreau's era, that resistance, that repugnance, would be felt in regard to fears of the gradual extension of the power of money into new schemes of human ownership. Down south, white people owned black people, and by that fact, people could own people, and since people could own people, what was to prevent the white millmaster up north, in the town of Lowell say, from "owning" the white labor that came flocking into his factory every dawn when the factory whistle blew?  What I am trying to convey is a sense of real fear, at the gradual, seemingly unstoppable, power of money to reduce the populace to ever more debasing levels of human servitude.

The question people were asking themselves was "As long as there is slavery anywhere -- who is really safe?" They were asking thinks like "Am I really all that safe, merely because my skin is white? --Maybe that can change.  --Maybe they'll find a way to enslave me, too."

Thoreau was touching a hot button.

And of course you see in this quote his skillful deployment of Biblical  imagery. Back then, people were "Bibelfest" in a manner in which we are not now. They knew their scripture! In the Old Testament, there is arguing with God over the fate of the citizens of a town that is going to be destroyed. The person who is arguing with God pleads that if he can find, in the town  that is to be destroyed, perhaps even a hundred innocent persons, might God  then spare the town? --Well then, if perhaps in the town that God is in his wrath going to destroy for its general wickedness, perhaps he might not be able to find a hundred innocent persons, but he might perhaps be able to find ten. --If he can find ten innocent persons, will God spare that town?  --If he cannot find ten, maybe he can find one -- if he can perhaps find just one innocent person, might God refrain? This is, of course, powerful  rhetoric, or at least it was powerful back then, because of its resonances.>>