Randall Fuller - The Book That Changed America: How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation

T he house on Sudbury Road belonged to Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, the schoolmaster of a small private academy in Concord, Massachusetts. It was sizable, but then so was Sanbornso tall and lanky that a Concord farmer once referred to his legs as God Almightys tongs when he strode across the stage in a melodrama written by the young Louisa May Alcott. At six foot four, Sanborn hulked and towered and loomed. Yet he often felt small and insignificant, a dwarf among the intellectual giants of a previous generation. He had been born too late to participate in the intellectual revolution of the 1830s, when Emerson and Thoreau and some half a dozen others had founded transcendentalism to protest the rampant materialism of American life. To compensate for his sense of belatedness, Sanborn rebelled. At age twenty-eight, his habitual stance toward life was that of opposition to whatever and whomsoever were for the time being in the ascendant in public affairs. He flouted tradition, courted controversy. Recently this had gotten him into trouble. For the past two months he had lived in constant icy terror that he would be arrested and tried for treasona crime punishable by death. Only through great force of will had he overcome his dread long enough to host this evenings dinner party.

Sanborns guest of honor was Charles Loring Brace, a member of an old, well-connected family from Connecticut. Among Braces numerous far-flung cousins was the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose remarkable best-selling first novel, Uncle Toms Cabin, had been published in 1852, one year before Brace himself embarked on the single greatest creative act of his life: founding the Childrens Aid Society. Brace established a Newsboys Lodging House to provide safe accommodations for the filthy army of homeless boys who sold newspapers throughout the city. In 1854 he began the program for which he is still remembered. Known colloquially as the orphan trains, his Emigration Plan transported thousands of abandoned, orphaned, and runaway children to rural areas in the West, where it was believed that healthful surroundings and stable families would transform their lives.

Brace was in Concord on this New Years Day because he had been invited by one of Sanborns closest friends and allies, Amos Bronson Alcott, the local school superintendent, to deliver a lecture, Alcotts face resembled a rumpled pillowcase. His eyes were watery blue. He was sixty years old, and he liked to walk with a gold-headed cane that had been presented to him by a coterie of young admirers in St. Louis who believed he was the most radical idealist in America. It was true: Alcott considered ideas more real than the physical world. He believed that thingstrees, apples, rivers, and swaleswere little more than a wan facsimile of higher ideals. This notion went a long way toward explaining his legendary improvidence; he once embarked on a three-month lecture tour and returned with one dollar. Another time, as a young man, he spent an entire winter peddling Yankee wares to rich southern planters, sleeping in slave quarters, and borrowing books from his hosts oak-paneled libraries, only to squander every cent he had earned on a new suit. His life would surely have been one of even greater indigence had he not married Abigail May, known as Abba and eventually immortalized as Marmee in their daughters most famous and beloved book,