The deedholders of the site of the creation of America
In 2022, John Kaag and his family bought an old farmhouse near the Concord River in Massachusetts. Attracted by the history of the area, Kaag, a philosophy professor, was also drawn by its proximity to the homes and haunts of those Kaag calls his “intellectual heroes,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and William James.
Once Kaag moved into the ancient house, he learned about another American family not as significant as these icons but whose members were still larger than life in their own way: the Bloods. The family’s story and its role in American history is the subject of Kaag’s latest book, American Bloods: The Untamed Dynasty That Shaped a Nation.
The story begins as Kaag finds the manuscript of Roger Deane Harris’s The Story of the Bloods in a hidden room of his house. The papers contain the names of more than 5,000 members of the Blood family, many of whom lived near Kaag’s home, which sits on the remnants of Blood Farm.
Harris had compiled information about his Blood ancestors and self-published it in 1960 as a family genealogy. His manuscript, which begins with England in the 17th century and ends with America in the very early 20th century, provides an overview of the Bloods and portrays significant moments in their lives as well as facts and dates. He ended the book asking family members to ask questions and contribute more information, but he died before he could add to his book.
The unintentional cliffhanger inspired Kaag to write American Bloods, which focuses on just eight members of a noteworthy but mostly forgotten family who participated in pivotal moments in the chronicles of America. Kaag tells their stories in detail and even includes one Blood’s unusually large thumb “that had been used to identify him, twice the size of a normal digit,” which some call “a murderer’s thumb.”
The Bloods had a “frontier ethos,” Kaag writes. “Their genealogy tracked what Henry David Thoreau called ‘wildness,’ a family trait that is an ‘animating force in American history.’” The American Bloods, Kaag explains, descend from Thomas Blood, who stole the British crown jewels because his land in Ireland was unjustly taken from him. His descendants would refuse to pay taxes in America because they felt taxation was unjust — they owned the land, not the governors. (Their feelings changed during the Revolutionary War when they depended on the militia.)
Thomas’s nephews, Robert, John, and James, came to America from England in the 1600s to escape religious persecution. They shared in the founding of the colonies. Their relative, Thaddeus, aided the Revolutionary War effort. Other Bloods served in the Civil War. One even knew John Brown. Later Aretas, who started out as a machinist, became rich by manufacturing locomotives. Then there was Perez, who was an amateur astronomer; Benjamin, who was a mystic and friend of William James; and Victoria, a feminist and spiritual healer who married into the family.
Kaag’s descriptions of the land “with its swamp mud” help to bring it alive and seem almost like another character in the book. This fairly significant family inhabits very significant land in American history. In 1640, Gov. Winthrop granted 500 acres of arable land to James Blood, who planted an orchard as well as corn, rye, turnips, and cabbages. Eventually the plot expanded to 3,000 acres, known as Blood Farm. James’s descendants would build homes and raise their children here in the shadow of the Old Manse. The transcendentalist lecturer and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote his celebrated essay “Nature” in 1836 while sitting in an upstairs room of the Old Manse.
For all of the title family’s untold brushes with important parts of history, however, the storyline of American Bloods is sometimes hard to follow. Kaag inserts too many incidents from his personal life that, although interesting, can be a distraction from the main story. Kaag begins and ends, for example, as he sees a creature that may be a wolf or a dog or a coyote (Kaag isn’t sure) in an area near a mysterious cave and marsh where there haven’t been wolves for more than a hundred years. It feels as though Kaag wants to add a supernatural significance to the Blood history, but it’s not clear why or what this has to do with the subject.
Still, it is an interesting keyhole on an area that has played much more than its share of a role in the country’s national life. Belonging to the Penacook tribe, the land in question was once called Musketaquid, or grassy plain. It was a place of “concord” before the white settlers brought smallpox, which decimated the native people who thought the settlers were “harbingers of death.” This Georgian-style gray clapboard house forms the nucleus of both Harris’s and Kaag’s books.
Emerson’s disciple, Henry David Thoreau, rented a room in the Old Manse and planted a garden in its yard as a gift to Nathaniel Hawthorne and his bride, Sarah Peabody. Hawthorne also lived in the house and used it as a setting for some of his stories.
Thoreau had a close relationship with Perez Blood, who spent his retirement years studying the planets. Like Thoreau, Perez never married and preferred to read and contemplate his relationship with nature. Emerson often visited 86-year-old Thaddeus Blood, one of the last living minutemen, to ask him for his memories about the Battle of Old North Bridge, hoping to add historical perspective and to flesh out ideas for his poem “Concord Hymn.”
It is a quote from this poem, about “the shot heard round the world,” the shot that started the American Revolution and began the Battle of Lexington and Concord, that really drives home how significant this place and the people who have dwelled on it have been. As Kaag writes it, the moment comes alive along with Thaddeus Blood, one of the first to hear the shot heard round the world and one of the last to remember it.
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Diane Scharper is a regular contributor to the Washington Examiner. She teaches the Memoir Seminar for the Johns Hopkins Osher Program.
