Thoreau teaches at the Concord Center School for about two weeks, but resigns abruptly when Deacon Nehemiah Ball orders corporal punishment as a means to quiet an unruly class. The incident is recalled by several sources:
Another early experience was the town school in Concord, which he took after leaving college, announcing that he should not flog, but would talk morals as a punishment instead. A fortnight sped glibly along, when a knowing deacon, one of the School Committee, walked in and told Mr. Thoreau that he must flog and use the ferule, or the school would spoil. So he did,—feruling six of his pupils after school, one of whom was the maid-servant in his own house. But it did not suit well with his conscience, and he reported to the committee that he should no longer keep their school, if they interfered with his arrangements; and they could keep it.
(Thoreau, the poet-naturalist (1902), 32-3)
To teach was the work that usually offered itself to the hand of a country youth fresh from college. Failing to find at once a better opportunity afar, Thoreau took charge of the Town School in Concord, but, it is said, proving heretical as to Solomon’s maxim concerning the rod, did not satisfy the Committeeman, who was a deacon. Deacon —– sat through one session with increasing disapproval, waiting for corporal chastisement, the corner-stone of a sound education, and properly reproved the teacher. The story which one of Thoreau’s friends told me was, that with a queer humour,—he was very young,—he, to avoid taking the town’s money, without giving the expected equivalent, in the afternoon punished six children, and that evening resigned the place where such methods were required. One of the pupils, then a little boy, who is still living, all through life has cherished his grievance, not understanding the cause. But we may be sure his punishment would not have been cruel, for Henry Thoreau always liked and respected children. Later this pupil came to know and like him. He said “he seemed the sort of a man that wouldn’t willingly hurt a fly,” and, except on this occasion, had shown himself mild and kindly.
(Henry Thoreau, as Remembered by a Young Friend (1917), 20-1)
. . . I’d just come from the district school, where I had a woman teacher. Now the women teachers taught, when we’d finished with a lesson, to put away our books and fold our arms . . . Well, the rule at the Academy was that a boy should always have a book before him. First thing I knew, Henry Thoreau called me up and thrashed me. He thrashed 12 other boys that day, 13 in all, and resigned the day after.
I didn’t understand the reason for this then, but I found out later. It seems he’d been taken to task by someone—I think it was Deacon Ball—for not using the rod enough. So Thoreau thought he’d give the other way a thorough trial, and he did, for one day. The next day he said he wouldn’t keep the school any longer, if that was the way he had to do it.
When I went to my seat, I was so mad that I said to myself: “When I’m grown up, I’ll whip you for this, old feller.” But . . . I never saw the day I wanted to do it.—why Henry Thoreau was the kindest hearted of men.
(Allen French, Interview with Daniel F. Potter)
The incident is also alluded to in an annual school committee report, published the following year:
In regard to schools generally, the past year your Committee have the satisfaction to report favorably. While some have been eminently successful, and are models for any schools of the kind, none have fallen below mediocrity. We would however mention an interruption in the Fall term of the centre grammar school, and the winter term, of district No. 4, which was occasioned by a change of masters and produced the usual evil attendant on that event.
Prudence Ward writes to her sister Caroline Ward Sewall on 25 September:
Henry only kept the School a week or two and gave it up. The Committee thinks that a school cannot be governed without occasional resort to corporeal punishment, and H.—whipped one or two, but finding it against his conscience and thinking the surveillance of such a Committee wouldn’t be comfortable—as it would be impossible at first, and perhaps never, to keep the school as still as they would require on his plan—he gave up, and means to get an academy or private school where he can have his own way.
(transcription in The Thoreau Society Archives at the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods; MS, private owner)
