In the spring of 1851, having finished his freshman studies for Harvard at Exeter Academy, Sanborn resolved he’d go visit the great man, Ralph Waldo Emerson. He’d just show up, and see what came of that. He’d been hearing about Emerson since early childhood. He’d also read him -- in fragments. Now, in April, early in the morning, Sanborn left Sudbury with a schoolmate and walked to Concord. The two went first to the bridge and the battle-monument, then on to the Old Manse. Bracing himself, Sanborn now headed straight for Emerson's house, his friend following behind, hard put to keep up.

Emerson’s door was wide open. Sanborn saw a little girl coming down the stairs, who he supposed was Emerson’s daughter, Ellen, then twelve years old. He did not see Emerson that day. Two years later, at the end of his sophomore year in college, Sanborn would again boldly call on the man, and introduce himself.

That summer, in 1851, even as her friend George Ripley's Utopian experiment Brook Farm faced certain closure, Elizabeth Peabody's unique Boston bookshop shut its doors. Elizabeth delivered all the store's remaining books, and assorted scattered piles of leftover copies of The Dial, to her brother Nathaniel, who had in the meantime opened his own apothecary shop.

In the fall, a fugitive slave from Virginia, Henry Williams, took shelter in Concord, in the home of the Thoreaus. Henry Thoreau set out to get a ticket for him at the railway station but there saw a man who so looked and behaved like a Boston policeman, he said, that he thought it best to be cautious, and waiting patiently until such time as it seemed safe for him to go forward with the purchase of a ticket for a train going north to Burlington, Vermont, from which Williams would go on to Canada.

Sanborn entered Harvard as a sophomore in September. He was still under age, he noted, also bragging that he had such a good a reputation for scholarship that it caused other scholars in the sophomore class to tremble. They feared he’d be a troublesome rival in the strife for honors, he said. But, Sanborn humbly submitted, he had no such ambition.

Sanborn’s admission to Harvard coincided with its most turbulent political era, what with pro- and anti-slavery sentiments tending to tear everyone and everything apart. Sanborn was gratified to find allies at Harvard. For one thing, through his impending 1854 marriage to Ariana Smith Walker, he’d become kinsman to Harvard’s liberal Christian President, James Walker, who’d give Sanborn permission to miss Sunday services in the College Chapel in order to go hear the scandalous preachings of Theodore Parker at Boston's Music Hall.

Sanborn lived inroom 16, Holworthy Hall, from September, 1852 to March, 1855. He was neither shy nor antisocial, making friends easily, without ever tending to exaggerate his own importance, he said. Whatever came along was fine with him, he said, so long as it provided occasion for learning human nature and practicing social good humor. And yet, he knew he was different from most people -- free of ambition. He did not yearn for wealth, he said. He did not seek leadership. He did not want to pursue a high station in world affairs. He said that such leadership as he wanted (and he could see that educated men certainly were expected to take the lead, somehow or other) had only to do with authentic character, not mere ambition.

He knew this much, he said: he would not be domineered over. He saw no reason why he should take his opinions from the majority, or even from the cultivated minority, or from any source other than his own much considering mind. He admitted to a certain level of pride in him, but insisted his pride was a respectable sin compared to what was worse -- and far more common -- vanity.

In July, 1852, after visiting his uncle Benjamin on Charter Street, Sanborn called on Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was visiting her brother, the Reverend Edward Beecher, then a preacher in Boston's North End. She was at the height of her fame, Sanborn recalled. She was the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, one of the epoch-making books of the nineteenth century which, after coming out serially in Dr. Bailey's National Era at Washington in 1851 and 1852, was published as a book, selling more than a quarter-million copies within a year and a half.

Harriet and Edward were two of thirteen children fathered by Lyman Beecher who, beyond being already widely known as the arch-enemy of Unitarianism, was then gaining reknown as the embattled antislavery President of Cincinnati's Lane Seminary. His daughter Harriet and her husband Calvin were only too glad to leave the city: Harriet described Cincinatti as a city divided – divided by thieves, thugs, slave kidnappers, and arsonists -- a mayhem of corruption interrupted only by outbreaks of cholera.

The two had moved from Cincinnati to Brunswick, Maine, where Calvin had accepted a professorship at Bowdoin College. -- It was there that God dictated my great book to me, Harriet said later, admitting also that the book was much watered down from the original manuscript. She said she'd eventually edited out not only a good portion of what God had dictated, but also much of what she'd gathered in a visit south to Kentucky years before, as well as a good chunk of what she'd learned from abolitionists, escaped slaves, and slave kidnappers through the 18 years she'd lived in Cincinatti.

Stowe knew she could not publish what God had helped her shape. She'd face disgrace herself, or be charged with some crime or other, should she take it upon herself to reveal the disgrace of slaves being bought and sold like chattel, families ripped apart, unspeakable hardships endured. A stronger book, Stowe worried, would find no readers in America, there being no stomachs strong enough, apart from slaveholders', for digesting the truth.

There simply were no fashionable or dainty words available to a writer for telling of slaves fettered by leashes, iron manacles, balls-and-chains, stripped and pilloried, ears nailed to yokes, backs clawed by wire bristles, wounds salted with hot lard, tar, brine, or turpentine, limbs and organs squeezed by red-hot metal pincers, teeth extracted by horseshoe pliers, eyes goudged out by slaveholders' thumbs or by dirty spoons, backs whipped by knotted ropes, ox hide strips, or woodplanks riddled with screws, bolts, and spurs, even stuffed, naked and bleeding, into three foot high cubicles topped in glistening tin, to be set out by their righteous masters to be baked alive by the sun.

American readers were ripe for Stowe's book, such as it was. Watered down though it may have been, still it was strong stuff, igniting controversy.

Meanwhile, in Concord, Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne had quietly bought from the Alcotts, and Emerson, the house the Alcotts had called Hillside, which originally had been known as the Cogswell house. The Hawthornes renamed the house and property Wayside. hawthorne was prospering financially, resulting form the success of his Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables. On moving into his new house, Sanborn noted cynically, the successful author held a big reception for his friend, General Franklin Pierce, so that the Democratic candidate for President could be more widely introduced to his New England partisans.

It was 1852, the year Daniel Webster died. Mark Twain was seventeen, living in Hannibal, Missouri, contributing to his brother's newspaper. Ariana Walker now wrote from Boston, excitedly telling Sanborn in New Hampshire of her joy in being swept up into the growing clamor of the cultural conversation going on all around her there. Individuals all have their own particular insanity, she noted. Hers was for persons. She was a little mad on that subject, she said. People -- not just friends only -- gave her more subtle pleasure even than music. At the moment of her writing, she said, there were a half a dozen people around her, talking. She found the conversation intoxicating -- the wine of life. She wished he could hear Bronson Alcott talk of Emerson. Alcott looked on Emerson as almost a descendant of the gods, ranking him among the old Greek philosophers: there was Pythagoras, Plato, then a dearth. After many ages, Emerson dawned.

Sanborn envied her these glimpses into the world of literature, music, and intimate friendliness – a world into which he’d soon be entering, he noted. So soon as his college examinations were over, he headed for home, Hampton Falls, where Ariana would also soon arrive. They spent a month together, spending much of their time with those of her friends who were privy to their engagement. Ariana, Frank noted, was unusually well. Her new interest in life seemed to have given to her illness a favorable change. The two enjoyed the lovely August days, taking afternoon walks, going to evening parties, and occasionally taking a carriage to Hampton Beach.

Later that year Sanborn was introduced, by Ariana's good friend Ednah Littlehale, to the Alcott family, then living on Pinckney Street, Boston, where Louisa and Anna would open a school in the front parlor. Sanborn said that all through Littlehale's ceremonious introduction of him to the family, Louisa sat silent in the background of the family circle, her serious, expressive face and large, dark, melancholy eyes fixed on the visitors. Sanborn was delighted to join the family for their vegetarian evening meal, entirely captivated by the magnificent presence of sagacious, white-haired Bronson.

A new generation of Harvard students, despite their school's rejection of rebel Transcendentalists, or because of it, looked for new visions and ideals from Alcott, as well as from George Ripley and Ralph Waldo Emerson. These seemed to them to be the new leaders, men worth studying and emulating. Among the searchers was a Divinity School student, Moncure Conway, 22, the son of a Virginia plantation owner who befriended the engaging six-foot-five Sanborn. Conway found Sanborn's intelligence and enthusiasm to be quite as remarkable as his soaring height. Upon meeting the colorful abolitionist conversationalist Alcott, Conway abandoned his inherited pro-slavery sentiments and sought Alcott out at every opportunity. Later, as a Unitarian minister, editor, lecturer, abolitionist agitator, and patron of the arts, Conway would, like Sanborn, promote Alcott's reputation and give generous aid to the family through many years to come.

It was at this juncture, Sanborn said, that he got to know Theodore Parker, Boston's best-known Unitarian firebrand, and orator, a determined abolitionist who had listened attentively to hundreds of stories told him by fugitive slaves. Every negro in Boston was said to know or have met the preacher, Parker.

On July 5th Thoreau wrote his sister Sophia to say he had heard Mr. Pierce, the presidential candidate, had been in town visiting Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose college chum he was, and that Hawthorne was writing a life of him for electioneering purposes. Hawthorne in fact was at work on a political biography of Pierce, who reward him after his election by making him the United States consul in Liverpool.

Both Whigs and Democrats had taken their time settling on candidates. The Whig party, having succeeded in putting General Zachary Taylor in the White House in 1848, now chose as their candidate another Mexican War hero, General Winfield Scott. The Democrats picked for their candidate the obscure New Hampshire Senator, Franklin Pierce. As both parties supported the Compromise of 1850, debate over slavery seemed reckless, so instead the two sides went at each other over personality differences, Pierce's camp calling Scott a pompous ass. Pierce at 48 was known to have a drinking problem, so Scott and the Whigs went at him that way, praising Pierce as the hero of many a well-fought bottle.

For all that Pierce, denounced as a northern man having southern principles, was elected President.

Sanborn noted that he’d changed his residence to Cambridge while attending Harvard, but had maintained his right to vote in his native town in New Hampshire. It was there, under the law, that his washing and mending was done. His first vote was to be cast not that November, he noted, but in the New Hampshire state election that followed the inauguration of President Pierce.

In December Louisa May Alcott wrote of her going to the Boston Music Hall in order to hear Theodore Parker, whose lectures Sanborn was now attending regularly. He couldn't resign himself to the rote of routine coursework, feeling he just wasn't learning much worthwhile from his assorted Harvard professors.

Sanborn claimed he was more indebted to Concord than to Harvard. For all its history and obvious advantages, he said cynically, still it lagged. Though Sanborn would become the editor of The Harvard Magazine, he would later remember nothing in particular from the experience, except how much work he had put into it. If he was making any progress in life, he felt, it could only be attributed to his reading Emerson and listening to Alcott or Parker. The best influence on him, he said, was spending time with Ariana Walker, his Anna, to whom he'd become engaged. To love her, he said, that was the best liberal education.

The two lovers now announced their engagement, following a harsh recurrence of Anna's mysterious illness. They’d be married, Sanborn promised, so soon as his college coursework was concluded and his position in the world established.

In the spring of 1853, the Hawthornes left Concord for Liverpool, where Nathaniel would serve four years as Consul. Sanborn said it was then that he came to be familiar with the widow, Mrs. Horace Mann, who now moved, with her three sons, into the house vacated by the Hawthornes.

Around this same time Sanborn also got to know Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe. He also made the acquaintance of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who’d sometimes preached in Hampton Falls when he'd been a minister in nearby Newburyport. Sanborn called on Whittier in Amesbury, and heard Longfellow lecture at Harvard. When he became the secretary of Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Club in 1853, he donated several of Theodore Parker's books and pamphlets, along with some women's suffrage tracts, to their library. All of the records he kept for the club, he reported, as was required by the club's rules, were written in verse.

In July, 1853, Sanborn walked from Cambridge to Concord to introduce myself to Emerson. He found the great man sitting in the study, wearing simple clothes, looking like he’d just come from working in the garden. His shoes were scuffed and dirty. Though Sanborn had brought no letter of introduction, Emerson received him courteously. He plied Sanborn with questions about Harvard which, he said, had lately turned a cold shoulder to him. He said he hoped to see a good crop of mystics emerging from Harvard. Sanborn later said he had no memory of how he’d responded, but it was trifling enough, no doubt.

Emerson always kept a hopeful eye open on young men who sympathized with his poetry or philosophy, Sanborn said. He especially liked those who valued the likes of Bronson Alcott, whose monologues, Emerson said, always made him think of Don Quixote.

That October, as Alcott set out for a midwestern lecture tour, Sanborn returned to Concord with four of his school chums -- to consult the oracle, as Sanborn put it. They spent the afternoon talking with Emerson and his family. There was plenty to talk about afterwards, Sanborn remembered later, as he and his friends walked way back through Lexington and West Cambridge to their Harvard dorm rooms, which they reached at around two in the morning.

In November a free negro woman stayed at the Thoreau home while trying to raise funds to purchase her husband from his Virginia owner who, Thoreau indignantly observed, stood to make a $200 dollar profit. Despite his again having been elected curator of the Concord Lyceum, he refused, feeling he wouldn't be able to find, for lack of paying adequately, potential lecturers.

In Worcester, Thomas Wentworth Higginson took in his sister-in-law Ellen Channing and her children. Her husband Ellery, the Concord poet, seemed to prefer going out on long walking excursions with Henry Thoreau to spending time with his annoying wife and four children. Both Emerson and Thoreau found oft-cranky Channing, officially listed in a Concord census as a do-nothing, genuinely entertaining. It was said Channing's best friend was his dog, Professor, who reportedly had a better sense of humor, and a better knowledge of nature, than his master.

For years the Channings, first in their cottage on Punkawtasset Hill and then in their village house on Main Street across from the Thoreaus, had kept up the appearance of domestic tranquility, Ellen feeding and clothing her brood with funding that came in from Channing's father. But now they'd reached an impasse, and Ellen had moved out. She and the children stayed first at the Higginson home, until April, before moving to an apartment in Dorchester. The Channings would be reconciled one year later. Their fifth child, Edward, fated to become a Harvard professor and Pulitzer-Prize winner, would be born in June.

1854 would see Commodore Matthew C. Perry negotiate the treaty that would open Japan to the West, even as some 13,000 Chinese would arrive to go to work on the transcontinental railroad. Bronson Alcott would return from his midwest lecture tour with a one dollar profit.

In May,1854, Stephen Douglas introduced to Congress the bill establishing Kansas and Nebraska as territories whose legislatures would decide whether they'd be slave or free. Under the Popular Sovereignty clause of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, it was expected Nebraska would choose to be free, with the opposite holding true for Kansas, despite the game-rules set down in the Missouri Compromise. Opponents of the act began to coalesce into a new political party, its members calling themselves Republicans. New England Abolitionists rushed to finance the sending of likeminded antislavery settlers into Kansas. Bloody fights and raids between pro- and antislavery settlements erupted. Separate territorial governments were established, one slave and one free. Each had its own capital. Though he represented only a minority, the territorial governor was appointed by President Pierce and could officially recognize only the proslavery government.

In Boston, a fugitive slave named Anthony Burns was arrested. Three Virginia bounty hunters caught him peering into a jewelry store window. They couldn't legally make an arrest but, as Deputy U.S. Marshall A. O. Butman had happened along, they pointed to Burns, triggering Butman's running at once into Brigham's saloon to call for help. Burns, six feet tall with a deformed hand and a scarred cheek, was conveyed first to the Boston Court House, then into the jury room of the United States Court. There, one Colonel Suttler took off his hat, made a bow, and asked, How do you do, Mr. Burns? Why did you run away from me?

Burns said he’d fallen asleep aboard the vessel he worked on, and before he woke up, he said, the ship had set sail, and carried him off. On hearing that, the colonel laughed, put his hat back on, and turned away. Burns was locked up. The thirty-nine year old Boston lawyer Richard Henry Dana, Jr., bestselling author of Two Years before the Mast, volunteered his services. Burns turned him down, feeling there'd be even greater hell to pay in Virginia if, in New England, he attempted to resist arrest. Dana nevertheless threw himself into spreading the word that Burns, a fugitive slave, was in custody.

An ad hoc vigilance committee rally was organized, which included forty-four year-old Unitarian preacher Theodore Parker, fifty-three year-old advoacte for deaf, blind, and mute, Samuel Gridley Howe, 42 year-old abolitionist agitator Wendell Phillips, and thirty year-old vigilantee minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Over sixty people attended the meeting at Faneuil Hall that evening. Higginson tried his best to excite the crowd into attacking the courthouse but, when it was put to a vote, the plan lost three to one.

To the Court House! a voice called out in opposition to the vote. To the Court House!

The Hall dissolved into turmoil, Concord's do-nothing poet Ellery Channing storming out shoulder to shoulder with Samuel Gridley Howe, Phillips, Parker, Higginson and whites and blacks enough to tear down the courthouse. They smashed open the front doors and rushed up the stairs, even as club-swinging policemen came rushing down. Higginson was clubbed in the face. A shot was fired, killing an officer. Attackers following Higginson fled the scene. Cowards! Higginson shouted after them. Is it you who will you defeat us now?

Military reinforcements arrived. Soldiers with drawn bayonets encircled Burns, keeping the crowd at by, escorting him to the ship that would return him to his bondage the next day. Flags flew at half-mast amid buildings draped in black. What a lot of folks! Burns remarked, just to see a colored man walk down the street.

Parker, Higginson, Phillips, and others were indicted by the federal government for their conspiring to foment rebellion. The Phi Beta Kappa Harvard

graduate, master of seven languages, and Unitarian minister, Higginson, was named in the bill of particulars as the number-one culprit in the unlawful and riotous attack against the Federal Court House with a battering ram.

He did fire and discharge sundry firearms, the indictment charged, and he did utter loud cries and huzzahs to the great terror and disturbance of diverse citizens. The judge dismissed the indictment on a technicality.

In the spring, Emerson opened up his study for a formal conversation with Bronson Alcott. Some young men arrived from Harvard, mostly from the divinity school. Among them was one of Sanborn’s college friends, Edwin Morton of Plymouth. Morton had seen Brook Farm from the inside, as his father and uncle had invested money there, -- money which was lost (as was most of the money that was contributed). On this May afternoon, between 2 and 3 o'clock, Sanborn and his colleagues gathered in the Emerson library. Emerson opened the conversation by raising the question, could literature be, in America, a young man's occupation and bread-winner? Sanborn reported Emerson felt confident it could.

From this topic they then turned to consider Harvard professors and those who had preceded them -- Longfellow, George Ticknor, Edward Everett, and Jones Very. Emerson had edited two essays of Very's in 1839 and also, while the slightly insane poet was in the McLean Asylum, a selection from his sonnets. After Very left McLean’s, Emerson told Sanborn afterwards, he was only too lamentably sane, and never wrote a good verse again. Sanborn would meet the disturbed poet years afterwards, at his home in Salem, and feel the full force of Emerson's remark: The fire of spirituality in him had died out, Sanborn could see. Nothing but the pale ashes remained.

That summer, Thoreau was focusing his attention on abolitionist issues. On the 4th of July, Thoreau went before the Anti-Slavery Convention in Framingham to deliver his fiery lecture, Slavery in Massachusetts. Sanborn’s Harvard colleague Moncure Conway reported Thoreau had opened with the simple words, You have my sympathy. It is all I have to give you, but you may find it important to you. It was at this Anti-Slavery Convention that the radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison publicly burned the United States Constitution, calling it an agreement with hell and a covenant with death.

In August Thoreau received the first official copy of Walden, the title page proclaiming Thoreau's intent to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, accompanied by a picture of the cabin drawn by his sister, Sophia. Sanborn knew Thoreau was critical of his sister's artwork, recommending just a slight alteration, chiefly in the door, in the wide projection of the roof at the front. He may also have noticed her trees were firs and not pines, Sanborn said, with a few deciduous trees that did not then grow in Concord.

Immediately on the publication of Walden, Thomas Wentworth Higginson shot off a letter, heartily thanking Thoreau for sending him his comments on slavery. These Thoreau had shared at the Framingham gathering. I need hardly add my thanks, Higginson wrote, for a copy of your book Walden, which I have been awaiting for so many years.

And now, in late August, after the years of their own waiting, the two lovers, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn and Ariana Smith Walker were wed -- eight days before she died.