All that I knew about Concord was what I had been taught in school: that it gave birth to the nation and the nation’s literature. When friends would visit from out of town, I was as eager to show off Concord’s many famous sites as they were to tour them. We would begin our walking tour at the Old North Bridge, where the American Revolution began on April 19, 1775, when the colonial militia or minutemen faced down British regulars and sent them fleeing back to Boston. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s description of  “the embattled farmer” and “the shot heard round the world” is etched on an obelisk at the eastern side of the bridge. On the western side is a statue of a local man leaving behind his plow to take up his musket against his mother country. Since its erection on the one hundredth anniversary of Concord fight, the Minuteman Statue has become iconographic, a statement that the commitment of the United States to liberty is natural and thus inevitable, having sprung from the very soil, the Concord soil, tilled by local farmers. On my twelfth birthday, I received a miniature, sterling silver version of the Minuteman Statue to add to my charm bracelet, a reminder that I was born where American freedom began.

    After showing friends the bridge, I would lead them to the nearby house where Emerson’s grandfather watched the battle from his backyard. This was where the tour would turn to American literature, which, like the country, was arguably born within sight of the North Bridge, making this part of Concord doubly sacred ground. Emerson was staying here when he drafted his essay Nature (1836) before purchasing the house in which he lived across from George and Mary Minot for the rest of his life. A newly married Nathaniel Hawthorne later rented the same house by the bridge. Once called the Manse in honor of the ministers who lived in it, first the Reverend William Emerson and then the Reverend Ezra Ripley, it came to be called by the name Hawthorne gave it in the book he wrote while living there, Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). Toward the end of his life, the author of The Scarlet Letter (1850) purchased another home in Concord he named The Wayside. This house is located next-door to Orchard House, where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women (1868), the much-beloved tale of four sisters attempting to make their own way in a world that would have preferred their conformity. American literature has long been celebrated for its deep commitment to the same values the colonial militia fought for in the town that would later produce so many of the nation’s most prominent authors: personal freedom and individualism. And first among the American classics written in Concord that celebrates these values is Walden. And so afer touring the battle site and the Old Manse, my friends and I would head next to Walden Pond.

    Like the Minuteman Statue, the site of Thoreau’s sojourn has become an internationally recognized symbol of freedom. Thoreau’s purpose in building a cabin next to Walden Pond and subsisting on what he could grow nearby was to achieve freedom from capitalism, conformity, and all the other constraints of modern life. It was also, somewhat ironically it now appears, the place where he sought to extricate himself from the politics of slavery. A few weeks after setting up camp in the woods, Thoreau was stopped by Sam Staples, who in his capacity as tax collector asked Thoreau to pay his delinquent poll tax from the past six years. Thoreau refused on the grounds that the Mexican American War was a plot on behalf of the government to expand slavery. His
refusal cost him a night in the Concord jail. In his account of that night, “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government” (1849), Thoreau famously asserts that “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” With these words he inspired freedom movements around the globe to use civil disobedience as a means of protesting injustice.