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This debate was not confined to the airy theories of academics. Of the various abolitionists Fuller features, the breakout star is Franklin Sanborn, one of Darwin’s earliest American acolytes. Sanborn was a young man in 1860, only 28 years old, but he was already making a name for himself in Concord; in his later years he would be known as the “Last Transcendentalist.” (He would also gain local infamy for “fertilizing his garden with his own sewage.”) Sanborn had offered financial assistance to John Brown, and for thus aiding and abetting a convicted traitor to the United States he became a suspect in a federal investigation. Accordingly, he several times fled to Canada to escape arrest. Fuller’s most exciting chapter vividly describes a moment in April when Sanborn, returned to Massachusetts, is surprised and accosted by US Marshals, dragged kicking and screaming toward a carriage in the middle of the night. Alarmed by the ruckus, his neighbors rush out and join the melee, obstructing the Marshals’ designs long enough for a local judge to hastily scribble out a writ of habeas corpus—thus effectively saving Sanborn from the scaffold. The scene has little to do with Darwin; like many of Fuller’s anecdotes, it pertains more specifically to the New England intellectual climate of 1860 than to the American reception of the Origin of Species. But it was certainly a significant episode for the first wave of Darwin’s avid American readers.
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