A Hermit’s Life for Me

Brian Balogh: Today on the show we explore the history of solitude in America.

Joanne Freeman: You’ll hear about the legend of the 227-year-old hermit who enchanted some early Americans and threatened others.

Ed Ayers: We’ll learn just how alone Henry David Thoreau really was during his experiment at Walden Pond. Plus, we’ll dive into the Cold War history behind sensory deprivation tanks.

Joanne Freeman: In the late 18th century, debates about the nature of independence and liberty started bubbling up in the colonies and then the early republic.

Eric Slauter: When you think about the big stories of the 18th century, arguably the biggest is about individuals entering into or exiting from societies. If you would have to give a narrative to the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, that would be it.

Joanne Freeman: Historian Eric Slaughter says early Americans started to wonder how these big ideas apply to their own personal lives.

Eric Slauter: There’s a persistent theme in American politics of people who just want to be left alone. One of the fantasies is the Crusoe-like fantasy that one could go it alone. You see guidebooks to solitude, defenses of solitude and encouragements towards rural retirement or rural retreat. It’s hard for us to think that life in the 18th century was so busy that people needed to-

Joanne Freeman: That’s true.

Eric Slauter: … retreat from it, but that’s clearly how they saw it. I think that’s certainly one of the reasons why you do see hermits at all levels, from the retiring politician to the person who’s simply been in business and is looking to recreate within the natural world.

Joanne Freeman: Give us a couple examples of people in this world who really praised and even valorized the idea of solitude.

Eric Slauter: One thinks of Thomas Jefferson, whose first draft of a name for his retreat in Virginia was not Monticello but the Hermitage, or you could think of George Washington’s retirement as a desire to leave public life and return to a kind of solitude. You also have folks like Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, who when he was just in his early 20s penned a 100-page poem about the powers of solitude and continued to add to it over the next few years until he had produced a 200-page poem about solitude.

Joanne Freeman: One of the most popular fictional stories circulating at the time is about two Virginia gentlemen who head West and stumble upon a very unusual solitary fellow.

Eric Slauter: Hundreds of miles into the interior they find a cave inhabited by what purports to be a 227-year-old hermit.

Joanne Freeman: He must’ve introduced himself as, “Hi, I’m a 227-year-old hermit.”

Eric Slauter: They coaxed his story out of him. He was a vegetarian, which he said was good for his physical constitution, but also meant that animals didn’t fear him. He wasn’t naturally aggressive and so they all left him alone. He had spent his time really in a kind of meditation thinking on the important things of this world and the next. Reading through the newspapers and the almanacs and the imprints of these years, you’d find this character absolutely everywhere. I even found I think a newspaper advertisement for a wax works exhibition, a sort of early Madame Tussauds wax works exhibition in New York City in 1789 where the government was sitting that included this old hermit next to a Native American, next to George Washington, next to the British Royal family.

Joanne Freeman: Wow.

Eric Slauter: He was quite a popular hermit I think you could say.

Joanne Freeman: As hermits go.

Eric Slauter: As hermits go, quite a popular hermit.

Joanne Freeman: Some were enchanted by these tales of hermits. For others there was something in the idea of the solitary life which seemed threatening to the social order. They saw it as unnatural, maybe even sinister.

Eric Slauter: You do see this frequent denigration within the political theory of the day of this notion of solitude. A lot of social contract thinkers feel that human beings are naturally sociable and so they want to come together in conjugal relationships, in social relationships, in church relationships, and so forth, and that men are by nature social beings.
Thomas Payne is somebody who always valorizes union, and so consequently, solitude is a negative category for him. He gives you an example at the beginning of Common Sense, his great political pamphlet of early 1776, that the strength of a single individual could probably not erect a building in the wilderness, whereas four or five people together could.
Then even after the Constitution, one of the great Framers, James Wilson of Pennsylvania and one of the first law professors of the United States, gives a series of lectures, really one of the first public law lectures at the University of Pennsylvania in 1790 and 1791. He gives a lecture on the social contract, in which he proposes the thought experiment, what if suddenly you were reduced to solitude. Again, the question of what is natural for human beings, individuality and individualism or social collectivity is certainly on his mind.

Joanne Freeman: These disagreements about the value of solitude start to play into debates about the nature of the social contract, the role of government, and where rights come from.

Eric Slauter: There’s no getting around the idea that in the 18th century, people who think in terms of contract theory and the origin of governments and origin of states, they tend to think solitary individuals carry a certain bundle of rights out of the state of nature. They have various views about what the state of nature might look like, ranging from those who see like Locke, perfect liberty and perfect equality, to those who see Hobbes, a life that is, what’s the famous phrase, solitary, poor, nasty-

Joanne Freeman: Nasty, brutish, and short.

Eric Slauter: … brutish, and short. Solitary is the first word there.

Joanne Freeman: Interesting.

Eric Slaughter: The idea really, the main political philosophy of say the Declaration or of the American Revolution in general, tends to be that God gave natural rights to human beings, human beings use some of those rights to create civil governments, but still there’s always the retained right of revolution or the right to alter or abolish when a government is found to be imperfect in its protection of those inalienable rights.

Joanne Freeman: In theory, a person in solitude helps create a democratic society when they consent to the social contract, but in practice, the act of choosing to be alone was still suspicious. James Madison embodies this tension between both valuing solitude as necessary for independent decision making and recognizing that solitude can be anti-democratic.

Eric Slauter: You do see a lot of denigration of closet politicians who are utopian, thinking that that is not done in public or done with collective decision making. I do see Madison as somebody who is torn between this desire to be a closet politician and also to have decisions that are made collectively. I think there were many decisions made collectively, that he didn’t like that.
One of my favorite lines of his comes from a memo he wrote just before he appeared in Philadelphia. It’s a famous memo on the vices of the political system of the United States. He wrote in that memo that you can’t rely on character or religion within popular assemblies, political assemblies, to protect minority rights, because the conduct of every popular assembly acting on oath, which he said was the strongest of religious ties, shows that individuals joined without remorse in acts against which their consciences would revolt if proposed to them separately in their closets, so people acting in a way that they wouldn’t act if you presented certain cases to them.

Joanne Freeman: The question of who we are when we’re alone is not a new question. Both before and after the Revolution, debates continue about whether solitude helps us reflect and make kinder decisions or whether we become more selfish when we’re by ourselves. Eric Slaughter is associate professor of English and Deputy Dean of Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The State As A Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution.