The Wild Blood Dynasty

American Bloods—what a title! Hammering out agreement on the meaning of American is hard enough, but factor in blood—our precious bodily fluid, susceptible to poisoning in the fevered fascist imagination—and a brawl might just be brewing. If you’ve figured out that Blood is a surname, the subtitle of John Kaag’s new book (The Untamed Dynasty That Shaped a Nation) could possibly defuse the situation, but it too is provocative: If the Blood dynasty shaped the nation, why have we never heard of it?

Kaag, a philosophy professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, lives in a house on the banks of the Concord River that was built in 1745 by a colonial named Josiah Blood. A decade later, in that same house, Thaddeus Blood was born. He was at the scene with a musket on April 19, 1775, when the “shot heard round the world” was fired; as an old man, he was interviewed about the experience by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Kaag saw that the Blood clan would offer him a chance to explore big ideas in relation to individual lives, to start close to home and expand outward, weaving together personalities, cultural history, and philosophy in an attempt to ask not just where we came from but where we’re going.

He has made a habit of combining philosophy with first-person narratives of a confessional cast. In American Philosophy: A Love Story (2016), he tells us about his first two marriages while communing with his “intellectual heroes,” the New England thinkers Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James. In Hiking With Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are (2018), he treks up and down an alp or two with the German iconoclast. The new project is much more ambitious. Working with a bigger cast on an expansive stage, he’s hoping to unlock secrets of Americanness. No wonder the strain shows.

Kaag sets out to trace the nation’s growth (and “excruciating growing pains”) as refracted through “one of America’s first and most expansive pioneer families,” whose lineage happens to run straight through his family home. Listed in the index of a privately published genealogy he finds in his house are thousands of Bloods, from Aaron to Zebulon. In addition to Josiah and Thaddeus, Kaag plucks out a handful of others, curious characters born between 1618 and 1838, who found themselves in the thick of roiling history or crossed paths with famous American thinkers.

[From the April 2023 issue: Adam Begley on why you should be reading Sebastian Barry]

Kaag makes the case that, “unlike many other more visible or iconic American dynasties” (he mentions the Cabots, Lowells, Astors, Roosevelts), the Bloods

The making of America meant pushing back the frontier, establishing civilization where before, as the Puritan William Bradford testified, there had been “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts & wild men.” Kaag asserts that New England colonials drew a clear, unwavering line between the civilized and the wild, but he believes that the Blood dynasty shared a more complicated ethos: Its members “continually explored life and its extremes,” absorbing the lesson that “human existence was not cleanly demarcated but unshakably wild.”

Hardly alone in wanting, just now, to weigh the risk of mayhem in America, he asks, “What untamed stories lie beneath the skin of our more or less well-functioning society? How persistent is the wildness that once defined our country?” The answers, he warns, won’t be tidy, though he can’t resist assigning conveniently emblematic roles to his small sample of Zelig-like Bloods.

Naked opportunism guided the first figure in Kaag’s book: Thomas Blood, who was not American but is the most notorious individual to bear the name. In 1671, he tried to steal the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London. A rogue as well as a thief, Thomas sets the tone for the American branch of the family, which was started by his nephews, who were among the early New England settlers, arriving sometime in the 1630s. By mid-century, Robert Blood had established a farm on a 3,000-acre tract just north of Concord, then very much the frayed edge of civilization. A “troublesome” man, Robert was a good citizen when it suited him and a renegade when taxes fell due. He nonetheless understood that the best defense against external threats was neighborly cooperation. The wary dance he did with local authority, in Kaag’s telling, “presages in miniature the political dynamics” as the colonies began to rebel against the British Crown.

The old favorites Emerson and Thoreau, Transcendentalists who championed American cultural independence and the primacy of the individual soul, take the stage as Kaag fast-forwards roughly a century to focus on Bloods intersecting with homegrown ferment. Robert’s great-great-grandson Thaddeus made an enduring impression on Emerson, who admired the rare courage that the veteran of the skirmish at the Old North Bridge had displayed as a young minuteman. Kaag suggests (though certainly doesn’t prove) that Emerson’s conversation with Thaddeus in 1835 was the catalyst for what he calls Emerson’s own “acts of insurrection”: two speeches delivered in the next several years, “The American Scholar” and the bombshell “Divinity School Address,” in which he renounced all organized religion (and in particular what he elsewhere derided as “corpse-cold Unitarianism”).

“The American Scholar” called for a new type of educated American, an active, engaged intellectual boldly embracing the rough-and-tumble of a new nation—what a pleasure to see the 34-year-old Emerson roll up his sleeves and resolve to “run eagerly into this resounding tumult,” to take his place “in the ring to suffer and to work”! And yet Kaag’s next Blood, Perez, son of Thaddeus, shrank from the tumult. A recluse and an amateur astronomer, Perez spent his time in his woodshed, seated on a swivel chair, peering at the heavens through a telescope. Undeterred, Kaag finds a way to fit him into his exploration of wildness by claiming that Perez had a “lasting and profound” friendship with Thoreau and helped him “define his conception of human freedom.” In the first sentence of “Walking” (an essay published in this magazine, posthumously, in 1862), Thoreau associates wildness with “absolute freedom”—as distinct from “a freedom and culture merely civil.” According to Kaag, both Perez and Thoreau freed themselves from “the tawdry distractions of modern life,” and the eccentric old stargazer inspired Thoreau “to see the inner, noble form of a seemingly common man.”

[From the June 1862 issue: Henry David Thoreau’s “Walking”]

The resounding tumult returns with James Clinton Blood, a co-founder and the first mayor of Lawrence, Kansas, and a passing acquaintance of John Brown, whose gory attacks on militant pro-slavery settlers helped give “Bloody Kansas” its name. James had gone west as part of an abolitionist scheme to keep the territory from becoming a slave state, and acted as an agent and a scout, buying up land from Native tribes. He survived the Lawrence Massacre of 1863 (when Confederate guerrillas killed some 150 unarmed men and boys), and in the postwar decades “happily watched the frontier town civilize itself.”

James is meant to be representative of the many Bloods who participated in the settlement of the American West and who “came to understand the border as a paradoxical space, where the most vicious of beings could also be the most vulnerable.” I don’t know whom Kaag is referring to in that last clause or what he means. He’s keenly aware that we can’t contemplate “the bleeding of Kansas” unless we reckon with the calamitous war fought over the moral abomination of slavery and also the genocidal persecution of the Native population. In earlier chapters, he mentions a few of the enslaved people bought and sold by various 18th-century Bloods, and here he describes the dismal fate of the Plains tribes who were cheated out of their land or driven off or simply exterminated. We never learn, though, whether James’s land deals were made in good faith or how other untamed Bloods fared on the new frontier. This seems the wrong moment to fudge: The stories we tell about how, exactly, the Wild West civilized itself color our ideas about who we are as a nation.

American Bloods is not a panoramic intellectual history or even a conjoined narrative. Nor does Kaag substantiate the claim that the Bloods “circulated through each era, an animating force of American history, just below the surface.” Don’t let the fancy blood metaphor distract you: Heredity cannot plausibly account for the persistence of an ideology or a spirit over a span of centuries. Instead of telling an unbroken story, Kaag has assembled a series of portraits, some more engaging than others, the degree of interest determined by which great men are adjacent to the male Blood in question. At one point, he alludes to what he calls “a largely forgotten counternarrative: the Blood women.” But his only substantive contribution to that counternarrative is to present us with the charismatic women’s-rights advocate Victoria Woodhull, who married Colonel James Harvey Blood, a veteran of the Union Army and a committed spiritualist. Kaag calls Woodhull “arguably the most famous and scandalous of the American Bloods,” and it’s perfectly obvious why he would want to adopt her: Extreme and mercurial, she’s an ideal embodiment of many divergent, unconventional responses to the trauma of the Civil War.

Victoria met James in St. Louis in the mid-1860s. Twenty-six years old and strikingly beautiful, she was working as a medium and a “spiritual physician” when James consulted her, seeking treatment for wounds suffered in battle. She fell into a trance and announced that their destinies were linked. James liked the idea: Obeying the spirits, they left St. Louis and their spouses behind. The new marriage lasted barely a decade—but it was some decade.

In New York, the soothsaying of this Blood-by-marriage morphed into investment advice (lapped up by an aged Cornelius Vanderbilt), and Victoria made “an utter fortune from her wildness,” as Kaag puts it. She founded a brokerage house and a crusading weekly newspaper, and waged energetic campaigns for free love and equal rights. Kaag concedes that Victoria’s “methods” as a healer and fortune teller “were fraudulent—which is to say too wild for belief.” He doesn’t try to make sense of her dishonesty, or condemn the blatant hypocrisy of her final incarnation: Having ditched James, she married a rich English banker, renouncing radicalism to secure for herself “the standing and success that women of previous generations could not have envisioned.” Kaag leaves it to the reader to connect her successive self-reinventions with the larger Blood narrative.

Having toured this gallery of “untamed beasts” exhibiting so many different shades of American wildness, we might ask what wild means to Kaag himself. I’m not sure. But it’s clear that one important step in his quest to make space for the “contradictions and tensions and paradoxes” of daily life has been coming to terms with Benjamin Blood, a promiscuously talented poet-philosopher. Benjamin’s rhapsodic mysticism, eccentricity, and primal vigor were particularly appealing to William James. This Blood taught Kaag’s hero that “the secret of Being,” in James’s words, “is not the dark immensity beyond knowledge, but at home, this side, beneath the feet, and overlooked by knowledge.”

A practical idealist, high-minded yet of the people (he’s been called “a mystic of the commonplace”), Benjamin was born in 1832 in upstate New York. Over the course of his 86 years, he was an inventor, a gambler, a gymnast, and a boxer, as well as a poet, metaphysician, and compulsive writer of letters to the editor—in short, the antithesis of a library-bound thinker. Dissatisfied with philosophizing, he told James that he “felt compelled to go into more active life,” to work 10 hours a day in a local mill. “I have worn out many styles,” he boasted, “and am cosmopolitan, liberal to others, and contented with myself.” His intellectual pursuits, Kaag writes, should be regarded “as an afterthought to action, the trace of a life lived as fully as possible.”

Deeply impressed by a self-published pamphlet, The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy (1874), James struck up a correspondence with the author and eventually volunteered to try to make him famous. He kept his word: The last essay he ever wrote, “A Pluralistic Mystic” (1910), is a hymn to Benjamin’s uncommon merit.

James directs our attention to a remarkable passage in which Benjamin explains that “the universe is wild—game flavored as a hawk’s wing.” Celebrating the contingent and the unfinished, Benjamin declares that “nature is miracle all. She knows no laws; the same returns not, save to bring the different.” We can never fully grasp reality; our understanding, in Benjamin’s words, is “ever not quite.” Or as James himself insisted, uneasy about what seemed an oppressively bureaucratic and professionalized 20th century, “There is no complete generalization, no total point of view.”

Kaag warmly welcomes the idea of the incomplete, of a cobbled-together and eternally unfinished worldview; he finds it frustrating but also encouraging. At the same time, he can’t resist imposing an overarching unity. Eager to wrap things up neatly, he claims that Benjamin Blood’s philosophy of open-ended, open-hearted pluralism—and of active engagement in the wider world—somehow “silently guided the Blood family from its very inception.” And yet the thought of the whole crew, from Thomas to Perez to Victoria, all wedded to a single ethos hardly sits well with Benjamin’s belief that “the genius of being is whimsical rather than consistent.”

What does this have to do with America? Kaag is telling us that wildness is with us always, yesterday and today, even the dangerous, corrupt, fraudulent varieties, but that beneficent wildness makes room for exploration, new ideas, new ways of being. A more perfect union is always possible—though ever not quite.

This article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “The Wild Blood Dynasty.”