On May 8, 1846, at Palo Alto, the United States went to war with Mexico, after Mexico's disputation of U.S. claims regarding the Texas border. Daniel Webster nicknamed his rifle The Wilmot Proviso when Congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania introduced a bill in the House of Representatives that would bar slavery or involuntary servitude from the territories annexed to the United States in the Mexican War.

In July, Henry David Thoreau was jailed for not paying his poll tax. He’d walked from his cabin in the woods to the village center to see about getting a shoe fixed, only to be arrested and imprisoned. Like Bronson Alcott, who’d once been shortly jailed on similar grounds, Thoreau found this right and just, saying a jail was the proper place for any civil person in a society that permitted war and slavery. To his chagrin, an aunt bailed him out.

In March, 1845, Thoreau’s friend Ellery Channing had told him he could see nothing for him but a field in which he ought to build himself a hut, and there begin the grand process of devouring himself alive. Thoreau had written a long letter to William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the The Liberator, who printed the letter on March 28th. Thoreau had railed against Concordians for not wanting Wendell Phillips to speak there, praising Phillips for opposing slavery and the annexation of Texas. Thoreau was resolved, and preparing, to beat a retreat from the affairs of men, from civilization, so-called.

Some said Thoreau had gone to the woods as much to escape from the noise and overcrowding of his mother's boardinghouse as to seek life's bare essentials. Emerson, who knew the value of his own quiet study at the edge of the village, had gladly given Thoreau permission to build the planned hut on land owned by him at Walden Pond. Thoreau had borrowed an axe, which he’d be proud to return in even better condition than he’d received it, and had set into cutting a clearing from a close stand of pine trees. Bronson Alcott, Edmund Hosmer, and George Curtis had helped him put up his cabin, built from the boards of a dismantled Irish shanty. Thoreau had moved in on the 4th of July.

Rumors circulated that Thoreau was harboring runaway slaves out in his hut, a station on the Underground Railroad. Thoreau indicated his cabin did, in fact, have a particular advantage for the purpose, but he was disinclined to talk much about it.

Visitors to the hut were forewarned about the shortage of seats, and were bid to come one at a time, or not at all. Anyone staying too long for Thoreau’s comfort would find him somehow getting further and further away from them, even within the cabin’s small confines, answering inquiries from an ever increasing distance.

Ten years after graduating from Harvard, Thoreau was asked by his Alma Mater to say something about himself. He gave them what he called some of his monster's heads: Schoolmaster, private tutor, surveyor, gardener, farmer, painter (house painter), carpenter, mason, day laborer, pencil-maker, glass-paper maker, writer, sometimes poetaster.

In February,1847, while still living at Walden Pond, Thoreau would lecture at the Concord Lyceum, two weeks in succession, on what he called The History of Myself. These lectures would provide the first public exposure to the work he was writing, which he would title, simply, Walden -- or, Life in the Woods.

Thoreau would leave Walden on September 6, 1847, eight days before General Winfield Scott’s troops captured Mexico City. Thoreau cryptically insisted he was leaving the woods for as good a reason as he’d gone there, saying nothing of Emerson’s just then departing for an extended visit to Europe, having asked Thoreau to be a houseguest during his absence. Thoreau would stay on, in fact, for two years.

Thoreau would then move back to the Main Street house he had helped his father rebuild, where he would live the rest of his life. He occasionally helped with his father's pencil-making business, improving the lead-grinding machinery. Once he’d learned the art of making a perfect pencil, he said, he gave up the work. In the attic of the house was his real work: his papers as well as his collections of pressed flowers and Indian relics.

After the failure of his Fruitlands experiment at Harvard, Massachusetts, Bronson Alcott, with the help of Emerson and Colonel May, his father-in-law, purchased the Cogswell House in Concord, on Lexington Road. At the end of the winter, in April, 1845, the family carried all their worldly possessions south to Concord on an ox-sled.

Though Fruitlands had proved fruitless, Alcott’s English friend and partner in the experiment, Charles Lane, stayed close to the Alcott family, tutoring the Alcott girls. In the fall, Alcott would learn from his brother Ambrose that their brother Junius was deranged. Alcott's friend Lane politely suggested that many of Alcott’s own troubles might likewise be due to insanity. Sanborn would later insist that though Alcott’s daughter Louisa had to contend against certain infirmities of temper, her father was free from these. He would note it was there, at the house the Alcotts had re-christened Hillside, that the 13 year old Louisa May Alcott first began scribbling her many and assorted verses on Despondency.

Sanborn was now fourteen. His New Hampshire childhood, he wrote, had included orating and acting, staging pleasant nightly revels. He’d been particularly fond of dressing up as Robin Hood. He said he’d read, beyond classic adventure books, much American history and biography. He’d spent long hours poring over Thomas Paine's Crisis and Thomas Burnet's Theory of the World Before the Flood, an account of the strictly orthodox antediluvian earth before the science of geology arrived, undermining all the tenets of the ancient faiths.

Sanborn said that by 1845, he’d studied the Bible thoroughly, Apocrypha and all. He claimed to have read the Old Testament in its entirety before he was 8. He'd then begun to read the works of Hawthorne, Carlyle, and Emerson, and had found their writings irresistible. He had read Sartor Resartus, Mosses from an Old Manse, and Emerson's poems, both in the Dial and in the Western Messenger, published by the Reverend James Freeman Clarke, the now grown son of Mrs. Clarke, who still ran Boston’s best known boardinghouse.

There, in Boston, the Reverend Theodore Parker had begun his stint of preaching at the old Melodeon Hall on Washington Street, where his friends had organized the Twenty-eighth Congregational Society. Parker lived nearby, on Exeter Place, in a downtown house, four stories high, a short walk from the Boston waterfront, and from the Athenaeum, the Old Corner Book Store, and the homes of Boston’s many and notorious other literary illuminati. The Peabody's house at 13 West Street was not far away, nor was the Town and Country Club, recently organized by Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

By February, 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, Mexico ceding California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah, as well as parts of Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, and Wyoming, to the United States, Sanborn had read a tremendous profusion of political literature, he said. He’d been reading steadily through the years of the Mexican War and through the troubled times of further territorial agitation which followed. Nobody, he said, could possibly read it all.

A number of the abolitionist ideas Sanborn seized upon had been widely purveyed in the national media through the founder of the Liberty Party, Gerrit Smith of Syracuse. The handsome New York aristocrat had been left, upon the death of his father when he was 23, with hundreds of thousands of acres of land in upstate New York. Perhaps feeling guilt over his good fortune, his vast inherited wealth, he had given three thousand farms to three thousand blacks, many of whom were escaped slaves, and dreamed of sharing wealth and lands between all blacks and whites, after the emancipation of slaves, one fine day. He was known far and wide as a gentleman, a philanthropist, a hypochondriac, an eccentric humanitarian reformer zealous in providing generous financial backing to most any cause, or to anybody, that he came across. He financed not only advocates for international peace, the insane, the imprisoned, but also women, Indians, food faddists, health nuts. His greatest passion, however, was for the cause of blacks, and the abolition of slavery.

Smith was convinced the constitution and slavery were inherently at odds with each other, and that abolitionists must find and defend new interpretations of the constitution, making it not the guarantor of continued slavery, but the very instrument through which slavery would be ended. From the inception of the Liberty Party in 1840 to its demise in 1854, Gerrit Smith was open to compromise. He did set one limit, however: there would be no yielding on the principle of immediate and unconditional emancipation and civil rights for free blacks. Were the nation ruled by laws consistent with the U.S. Constitution, Smith declared, slavery could not exist in America. Anyone abdicating his or her responsibilty to abolish slavery at once, and for all time, was guilty of both treason to the slave and ingratitude to God.

That spring, 1848, Daniel Drayton, the Captain of The Pearl, a sloop, was taken into custody in the lower Chesapeake for having seventy-six slaves aboard. Drayton was charged with stealing and transporting slaves.

Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe of Boston asked his friend Horace Mann to take the Drayton case in Washington. Howe wrote to him: No man in the country will make more out of a bad case than you can. Howe warned him, this could be dangerous. Abolitionists were under assault everywhere, and a lawyer defending the likes of Captain Drayton might very well get shot. Horace Mann was furious with Howe for talking to his wife about it, frightening her with such talk. Mary Mann told him to go ahead; it was right. She knew he had to take the case.

In court, he would show that the slaves aboard Drayton's sloop had not been stolen, but had run away. He insisted the color of one's skin was no prooof of slave status. He argued it was not larceny to induce a slave aboard a sloop. He declared slavery unconstitutional. The lower court decided against Mann, but the circuit court reversed that decision. Drayton was set free.

In the summer of 1848 Henry Thoreau joined Ellery Channining for a four day trip, on foot, through New Hampshire.

In November, Bronson Alcott and his family left Concord and moved to Boston. The following summer they'd move in with his wife's parents there, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Joseph May, and in January, 1850, would move out of the May household into assorted other living quarters. In the summer of 1850 the Alcott family, then located on Groton Street, contracted smallpox.

Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers was published in the spring of 1849.

California was seeking admission to the Union as a free state. Led by Henry Clay and Stephen A. Douglas, the Senate put forward the Compromise of 1850, proposing California be admitted as a free state. The other areas won from Mexico would be slave or free territories, to be determined by settlers. The slave trade would be banished in Washington, D.C., but not slavery itself. President Zachary Taylor and John C. Calhoun opposed the compromise. First Calhoun died, and then the President. Millard Fillmore, who now assumed the Presidency, supported the Compromise.

On March 7, 1850, Senastor Daniel Webster stood before the Senate, calling for the preservation of the Union. The country, he noted, had become vaster, extending across the continent, coast to coast. Webster spoke favorably of the Compromise, which then passed.

Sanborn was livid, seeing that the measure allowed anyone who owned a slave, or even claimed to own a slave, the right to seize any black for enslavement. He saw that the Compromise, nicknamed the Finality Measure, was intended to end all agitation against negro slavery forever.

Sanborn aligned himself with Northerners accusing Webster of betraying them in order to obtain the South's support, him contemplating a run for the Presidency. President Fillmore appointed Webster Secretary of State, but Webster resigned due to poor health. Sanborn bitterly accused Webster of having a fatal weakness of character which contrasted forcibly with the native strength of his understanding. He was furious that Webster had fallen away from the lofty positions he'd held earlier in his life.

Sanborn would mark Webster’s death in October, 1852 with wry pleasure, noting he died before he ever was able to cast a vote for Franklin Pierce, the pro-slavery President born and raised in their common native State, New Hampshire. Sanborn would long decry the evil Webster had done, it being at the crux of the eventual, unavoidable civil war.

In upper New York State, Gerrit Smith fiercely characterized southerners going north to seize blacks as kidnappers. He proclaimed them criminals, who deserved to be struck down in instant death. For Smith, the Civil War had started already.

The enemy was now seen to be not the slave power but the Federal Government, guilty of enacting the slave power's wishes.The Fugitive Slave Act transformed and united all abolitionists, of whatever stripe, bringing them in a common cause, a common commitment to civil resistance and to action.

In Boston, Theodore Parker spoke publicly, addressing his words to President Fillmore, who'd signed the Fugitive Slave Act into law: I am not a man who loves violence; I respect the sacredness of human life, but this I will say solemnly, that I will do all in my power to rescue any fugitive slave from the hands of any federal officer who attempts to return him to bondage. If I were the fugitive, and could escape in no other way, I would kill him with as little compunction as I would drive a mosquito from my face.

Gerrit Smith was soon leading a band of free Negroes, preachers, and farmers in the rescue of Jerry McHenry, a fugitive slave who had been seized in Syracuse, and faced being transported back to Missouri in chains. Gerritt Smith was just then in the city, presiding over a convention of Libertymen. That evening Smith and his men drove a battering ram through the police station's front doors, knocked out its windows, fetched the captive fled the scene, and packed Jerry off to Canada. Smith found the advnture altogether exhilerating. Through the next dozen years or so, he and McHenry's other liberators would gather annually to commemorate Jerry Rescue Day.

Not long after the liberation of McHenry, Smith was elected to Congress. No one could have predicted that this influential gentleman, probably the wealthiest man in Congress, would years later be led away, babbling and muttering, to an insane asylum.

Just weeks after the passage of the Compromise, Samuel Gridley Howe, respectable Director of the Perkins Institution for the Blind, spread the word around that warrants were being issued for William and Ellen Craft, a black couple who were, as it happened, parishioners in Theodore Parker's church. A Vigilance Committee was formed, the Crafts were hidden, and plans were made for enabling their escape. Just prior to their being snuck out of the country, heading for England, Parker, holding a Bible in one hand and a sword on the other, pronounced them man and wife.

Sanborn was then living, he said, footloose and fancy-free, susceptible primarily to the beauty of girls, in which, he'd noticed, few New England towns were deficient. He felt confident, all six feet four inches of him, that he cut a striking figure. Beyond his looming height, he struck many also as being startlingly handsome. His serious, elegantly chiseled face held wide, deep-set eyes under waves of black hair. He knew himself to be someone to be reckoned with. He'd never been in love, but he'd been attracted, at school or elsewhere, to this girl or that, especially to those having beautiful eyes, he said, or to those with a gift for narrative.

One afternoon in the summer of 1850, Sanborn admired two sisters in a family distantly related to his, two granddaughters of Samuel Langdon, the former Hampton Falls Parson. Catharine Cram, her sister Sarah, and their cousin Louisa Leavitt, who was also Frank's cousin, came to take tea with Frank's sisters, Sarah and Helen.

As boys were not supposed to be in the company of girls at tea time, Sanborn had gone to his room, opened his strong box, and had taken out a shiny half-dollar -- the largest coin he had. He'd then ever so quietly returned to the girls, deftly transferring the coin to Cate's purse, which had been hanging on the back of a chair in the parlor chamber. This, he proclaimed gleefully in old age, he had done all in utmost secrecy, telling nobody.

In old age Sanborn admitted openly to having had, in his youth, and beyond, no particular scheme of life. The course of his education would be meandering, shaped neither from without by his family nor from within through self-discipline. He remembered his mother scheming to approach her cousin, Senator Norris, to ask him to recommend her son be appointed a Cadet at West Point. Sanborn had told his mother, nevermind: he had no inclination to become a soldier.

In 1848, a rather exacting literary society was established in the upper half of the schoolhouse where Sanborn was a pupil. Debates were held, and a journal published: The Star of Social Reform. The Star accepted anonymous contributions from subscribers, both male and female, and the articles were read aloud at monthly meetings. In the winter of 1849/50, The Star's editor was his sisters’ friend, the lovely Cate.

Cate had a friend in Peterborough named Ariana Walker who’d also attended Mrs. Winslow's Endowed School at Tyngsboro who was, like Cate, very interested in literature. Cate showed Anna a parody written by Sanborn, titled Festus, and some ballads he had written.

Anna Walker enjoyed these so much that she sent them off to Boston to share them with a friend of hers, the twenty-six-year-old Ednah Dow Littlehale: I send you herewith some poetry by the author of Festus, Ariana wrote to Ednah. The author is a Hampton Falls boy. His name is Sanborne.

When, at sixteen, Ednah Littlehale's formal education had ended, she'd begun attending Margaret Fuller's Conversations at Elizabeth Peabody's Bookshop on West Street. Asked by Margaret Fuller, Is life rich to you? Ednah had responded: It is since I have known you.

At twenty-four, Ednah had begun attending Conversations at the West Street shop given by Bronson Alcott, a man much in the company of young women. That Ednah Littlehale was well known for being a devoted and beloved companion to Mr. Alcott, this seemed of no concern to Mrs. Bronson or their daughters.

Sanborn was pleased to learn of this, that Miss Walker had shared his poems and ballads with Miss Littlehale. He was even more pleased when high praise of his ballads appeared in a commendatory notice in the Star, submitted by one A.S.W. He begged Cate to introduce him to this admirer. Who was she, this Ariana Smith Walker?

The day came. The two first saw each other in a small church at Hampton Falls.

Ariana wrote excitedly to Ednah Littlehale, saying she’d seen Franklin Sanborn, and that he had a face like young Raphael’s.

Sanborn later summed up this initial meeting with three words: Our eyes met.