American Bloods
One family's pulse runs through American history in John Kaag's new nonfiction book about the Blood family and its outside impact on the country
The importance of Concord has been beaten into every school kid in Massachusetts — probably America too, but I can’t confirm. The American Revolution comes up every few years. We’re taught about the “shot heard round the world,” and the Minutemen who fought the British. We learn about Ralph Waldo Emerson and transcendentalism. We learn about Henry David Thoreau and talk more about Walden Pond than just about any other body of water save the Atlantic Ocean. Eventually, we find out it was also where Louisa May Alcott lived for large parts of her life.
But the town has deeper connections than just the great minds of the past. And it starts with the Blood family, which made Concord (and what would become Carlisle) its family homestead.
Immigrating from England, the Bloods settled and set themselves apart. They were an independent lot who lived on the outskirts of society, and who would have an outsized influence on American history—in the Revolutionary War; influencing Emerson, Thoreau, William James, the Industrial Revolution in America, and its westward expansion via the locomotive. But the family’s history and impact has largely been forgotten. Until now thanks to UMass Lowell philosophy professor John Kaag.
Kaag uncovered the Blood’s story while cleaning the new house he and his family were moving into. He discovered a stack of papers revealing the history of the Blood family. The papers led him to discover the connections the family had to America’s history and its outsized influence on the country and he explores all of it in American Bloods: The Untamed Dynasty That Shaped a Nation.
Kaag’s research not only tells the story of the Bloods, but reveals how the family’s impact reached out like a mycorrhizal network. In American Bloods, Kaag sees the interrelations of the many offshoots of the Blood family and American , as well as global, history and brings it all, somehow, to the present day but showing how these things connect. It’s a book about ideas and how they influence and move. And it’s enlightening to see Kaag’s ability to transition from the historical to the philosophical.
Kaag is the author of Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are, American Philosophy: A Love Story, and Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You mention [in the book] that you discover these papers in your home, so how did it happen exactly? How did you find out about this family in your house and what were you doing that you discovered stuff people left behind?
I was actually moving in to our new house.
Our house was built in 1745— it's right next to the Concord River —and we had moved in and I knew in some sort of vague way that it was owned by early residents of the settlement community outside of Concord. We were moving things in and when we started unpacking, we started moving things into what I thought was a cupboard. It was next to this large sort of be beehive oven slash fireplace that is in the center of the house, and the cupboard extended back quite a bit — it wasn't a normal closet — and someone had left a stack of papers in the closet, which turned out to be a copy of The Story of the Bloods, which was a privately published genealogy that basically detailed the family of the Bloods over the course of three and a half centuries.
It turned out that we were living in a Blood house built by Josiah Blood in the 1740s, and the home of Thad Blood, which was Thaddeus Blood, who was the last living survivor of the Concord fight, which sparked the American Revolution. That sparked my imagination to begin to sort of inquire, or think, about this family in a more careful way.
What makes you find this privately compiled set of papers and decide to write a book?
The answer is that the way that I write books is, typically, I wait for the story to find me and I try to keep a lookout for really interesting archival material or really interesting histories that I can then explore. American Philosophy: A Love Story, which was published in 2016, was this story about me finding this library up in the middle of the White Mountains. The Blood story came to me sort of unexpectedly, but I had known about the Blood family because of my studies of philosophy. Benjamin Blood was William James' friend and who introduced him to psychedelics. So that piqued my interest. Then I remembered that Perez Blood had been Thoreau's friend outside of Concord in the Estabrook Woods. Those two facts led me to think, okay, I need to read this genealogy. It turned out that both Benjamin Blood and Perez Blood were part of this sort of expansive family that began in the 1660s — both in England and in the United States — and then spread across the United States.
I found it interesting to go back to England. I didn't anticipate it. The English Blood stealing the Crown makes so much sense in terms of the American idea what people in England thought of settlers — the rabble rousing people trying to start a revolution and go against the crown — and this person literally tries to steal the crown. I found a great way to open a book and fascinating in terms of the rest of this. When you start reading that information, are you shocked at how perfectly it lined up?
Yeah, I mean, one of the ways that I thought about the book is the story of American Liberty and the story of American Freedom, which were always, from the outset, a type of wildness that was both illegal, but also promising. So I was trying to capture, in each of the eight chapters with these eight Blood family members, this type of ambivalence or this two-sided nature of American Freedom. And what you point out about Thomas Blood stealing the Crown Jewels is that the United States was formed in a rejection of the traditional social contract between governments and individuals that were ruled by those governments. The social contract basically works because governments provide certain services that individuals can't provide for themselves and individuals give up liberties on the basis of that and the United States, and also the British Civil War of the 17th Century, expose the fragility of the social contract and the way in which governments, when they did not perform particular functions, lost control of the individuals who were no longer willing to give up liberties because they weren't getting anything in return.
That was in the case, both in the British Civil War and in the territories that you see around Ireland and Scotland during the 17th Century, but then also that extended into the United States and into the colonial project.
You do a really great job of connecting the ideas going on around the world at the time, but the Industrial Revolution section I found the most fascinating because you bring in Marx and theories of the worker and worker rights during that time, and specifically here in New England. It’s sort of the ongoing battle that has continued since then and it really hasn't changed all that much, right? Those factories were replaced by different machines or systems and, I think, that reading this book in that context is important. I wonder if you felt as you're researching it that you were writing as much about today as you were about those days and those times?
It's a really relieving comment because that's sort of what I was hoping that would come across. Each of the chapters speaks to the present day in a particular way.
You're referring to chapter five and chapter six, I think, of the book where we see that what Western expansion and US industrial power was premised on the alienation of labor and on the alienation of certain demographics, namely the indigenous people of the Midwest, which had been pushed westward in the early 19th Century, but then also premised on the exploitation of underprivileged and particularly African-American individuals. So the sort of rags to riches story that is in chapter five of American Bloods, which is the story of Aretas Blood, who was born in Vermont in the early part of the 19th Century into abject poverty, but managed to become one of the wealthiest men and sort of captains of industry in New England in the second half of the 19th Century. He basically created the locomotive industry that pushed westward.
What you see with him is that he ran the risk of being exploited himself as being an underprivileged individual coming from rural Vermont, but then he ends up making his wealth on the backs of countless individuals in the factories that he founded. And what's interesting at the end of the 19th century, Aretas is instrumental in electrifying factories. He has the first contract with General Electric to electrify the mills, which had then moved south after reconstruction, after the Civil War. At that point, newly enfranchised African-Americans were then being exploited in the cotton mills basically that Aretas then purchased.
So it's really this story of great ambition, great freedom in a particular way, but then also great risk to sort of the moral of the nation.
His story is sort of like what we assume the American dream is. Anybody can do anything, but really it comes at the expense of a lot of other people in a lot of ways. Did you feel that he was kind of maybe at a point before a boss has no shame in the exploitation of workers, there was a little bit more risk at that point for capitalists taking on these endeavors, right? At any point these mills could have failed. Electrifying a mill could have been a problem, moving a mill could have been a problem. Did you see that in him at all? Or was it similar to today where he is just entirely focused on something else or has something changed where it’s different?
No, no. I mean, I think that the point of all of these portraits of the Bloods — which hopefully present a unique portrait of a country — is to present the very human nature of these individuals, which involves a type of fragility, a type of fallibility, a hopefulness, a type of idealism that is oftentimes sought, but never fully realized. And I found that to be really appealing in all of these portraits, Aretas included. That's one of the reasons why Aretas’ childhood and his early life is so important to me and to the story, because Aretas had these dreams and really wanted to realize them for himself and for his family and for his immediate community, and he did provide charitable works throughout his life. Manchester, New Hampshire, was basically built by him—including all the hospitals and all the social services— but, at the same time, there is this sort of dark underbelly to the way that capital operates.
A you were researching this, were you kind of enlightened by other people that were along the way that you found popping up in stories?
That was one of the joys of researching the Bloods, because the Bloods intersected with basically everyone from both American intellectual history, but then also American history and American economic history.
Thaddeus Blood, the last survivor of the Concord fight was interviewed by Ralph Waldo Emerson in order to form the “Concord Hymn” and “the shot heard round the world” poem. Perez Blood was Thoreau’s very good friend; James Harvey Blood was Victoria Woodhull’s husband, Victoria Woodhull being the first female candidate for the presidency in the second half of the 19th Century.
So yeah, one of the joys was to see how this family intersected with all the notable figures. James Harvey Blood and Victoria Woodhull Blood were good friends with Cornelius Vanderbilt. The coincidences and the way that this family quietly changed the nation and shaped the nation was really remarkable to me.
Pulling in outside sources out of the direct family research, were you conscious of what you were looking for to put them into context? Were you conscious of how far you went out and how far you reached for sources?
There's always a danger when you're doing intellectual history to sort of map ideas onto life in very artificial ways. What's nice about, I think, the Blood Family is they, in many cases, were actually in direct contact with the intellects of the time who were writing about American freedom. For example, Thoreau and Perez Blood directly.
It's very difficult in history to make a causal argument and to make a knockdown-drag-out-causal argument about the way ideas arise, but the way that the biographical intersected with the ideological in such a tight way in this case made it not only feasible, but likely there was a causal relationship between the ideas that arose in, for example, Thoreau and his interactions with [Perez] Blood. It also helps that he wrote about Blood extensively in this two million word journal that he put together.
I think that as an intellectual historian, you always have to worry: am I grasping at straws or am I really, am I coming up with some evidence that is compelling? I'm reminded of a William Ernest Hocking, the 20th century philosopher, comment that history is always a good part imagination. And I think that that's true, but it has to be tethered to the facts.
One of the things that I actually found really exciting about this book was revisiting a lot of Emerson and Thoreau. Did did you find it rewarding revisiting some of these things in the context of this story?
Absolutely. I live a mile and a half from Walden Pond and I swim there almost every day during the summer and I feel so fortunate that I get to sort of live in the same space as the thinkers who I have really read very carefully for most of my intellectual life, especially because the places are so important to them and to their philosophies. When it comes to revisiting Thoreau and Emerson through American Bloods, it was really an opportunity for me to go back to the archives and to look really carefully for evidence of a personal connection that had real historical and intellectual significance. The personal connection oftentimes drops out. We don't necessarily think about Thoreau’s comment, “in wildness is the preservation of the world,” and who Thoreau's wild friends were at that time. I didn't know until I started investigating the Bloods, and Perez certainly was one of them.
I was really struck with the Industrial Revolution, section because of the current moment of labor movements, and I was struck by you bringing Marx into a book because people think of him as one way and not really understanding his context to the rest of the world. So, I was wondering if you were excited to bring in other ideas about the worker and the thinking of the day and what these things are doing and maybe putting it into context for people to just think of all of these ideas as bad?
Absolutely. I mean, we oftentimes forget that Marx's philosophy and Marxism was really a movement in the 19th century that was global and had global reach. And we also oftentimes neglect the fact that Marxism and Socialism had real many proponents in the United States during the middle of the 19th century. And that's something that I tried to bring out in the course of the book. And also the correspondence between Transcendentalism, which arose in the 1830s and 1840s, and Thoreau's work. Walden was published in the 1850s and is direct contemporaries with Marx and Engels, and they're watching the development of the Industrial Revolution and also evaluating the promises of the Industrial Revolution and seeing those promises to be largely empty — namely that industrialization will make life uniformly better for the majority of people. In fact, it really doesn't in a lot of significant ways. Marxism and environmental philosophy have been brought together in the 20th century, and the Environmentalism that Thoreau is known for is intimately tied to the suspicion of mechanized capital and mechanized labor, which arose in the 1830s and 1840s.
I can imagine what Thoreau would think of today with the phones and the destruction of the Earth. So how do you put this into the context of today? How do you feel this place is in the history of today? Where are you hoping this settles in and where people find this book?
The book is about American wildness and about this sort of ethos of liberty that has run through our history and the sort of dangers, but also the potentials, associated with that mythology. When I speak to my students and when I go out into town and talk to people, Thoreau's comment that we live lives of quiet desperation [“the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”] is fairly descriptive of what I see today in some cases—sort of the flattening out of things or the sort of cynicism or the deadening of culture—and what I found in the Bloods is really this sort of life force, this idea that we should explore possibilities and wildness in a particular way. So that's one upshot that I'd like to put forward.
In other words, these are very average people that you would sort of overlook in everyday life, but they're doing extraordinary things in each case. It might sound rather idealistic, but what I would like is for us to look at the Bloods as the promise and parallel of liberty, but also the potentials that we oftentimes have beaten out of ourselves or out of our communities. The idea that we could actually be something or do something significant.
The final thing is I'm a philosopher and I've spent a lot of my career writing about philosophy, and the last two trade books writing about philosophy and memoir, and thinking that philosophy takes the driver's seat in a meaningful life, or it should.The Bloods showed me something different, which is life takes the driver's seat and oftentimes guides philosophy, that these impulses that we have that drive us to action are often far more powerful than the ideas that we have about what it is to live a meaningful or moral or reflective life. That insight, I think, is one that's not to be sort of embraced unreflectively, but rather just the knowledge that there are subterranean forces to us that are guiding our thoughts.
The story of the Bloods is the story of that sort of life force that underpinned the ideology and also the course of history in the United States.