On May 14, 1849 an essay called Resistance to Civil
Government was published in
an anthology called Æsthetic Papers. It would be a gross overstatement to claim that it immediately shook the world, or even that it attracted much attention at all beyond a narrow
audience of New England intellectuals known collectively as the Transcendentalists.
The author, a dreamy 32 year old
sometime handy man for his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson and the operator of a small pencil factory, was
obscure. The works that would
bring Henry David Thoreau a measure of fame and notoriety as
a hermit philosopher and naturalist lay in the future. But despite such an unpromising beginning the little
essay, which would later variously published under the titles Civil
Disobedience, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, and On Civil
Disobedience would influence
generations yet unborn and helped inspire movements which changed history.
Thoreau
was an intellectually curious, somewhat
socially inept, son of a local pencil maker of French descent and a mother of established New
England stock. He was born in Concord, Massachusetts on July
12, 1817. He was reared in the historic Concord Unitarian church served
by Rev. Ezra Ripley until 1841. When the beloved and liberal
Ripley died that year and the pulpit was assumed by a new minister who he considered insufficiently in touch with the divine
and over concerned with doctrine, Thoreau resigned his membership
and never returned, except for funerals and rites of family and
friends. He remained, however within the broader intellectual life that encompassed many Unitarian ministers
and lay people and which was the hatching ground for the
Transcendentalist movement.
He was
educated at Harvard, but did not settle into one of the expected respectable careers of law, medicine,
ministry or business. Instead he became a school teacher
and tutor—the occupation of a gentleman without prospects. After a brief stint as a public
school teacher in Concord, which he resigned
because he would not administer
required corporal punishment, he and his beloved older brother John
began their own Concord Academy in 1838. The school shocked folks by taking students out of the
classroom for frequent walks
through the meadows and woods to explore nature and visits to local shops and businesses
like the blacksmith where middle
class students were shown how things were actually made. The school ended when John died in his brother’s arms of tetanus in 1842.
During
these years Thoreau fell in with Emerson’s
circle when the Sage of Concord returned to his ancestral home after his unsuccessful
turn at a Boston pulpit.
He became one of the first members
of the group that regularly congregated at the philosopher’s home. Emerson enticed his friends to join him in Concord, and many did.
Others frequently made the short trips
from Boston and Cambridge. Among those regularly in this circle were Bronson
Alcott (father of Louisa May), the poet Ellery Channing, Margaret
Fuller (editor of The Dial), Nathaniel Hawthorne and
his wife Sophia and Sophia’s accomplished sisters Elizabeth and
Mary Peabody.
Although
only a few years older than Thoreau, Emerson became a friend and surrogate
father. He encouraged Thoreau
to publish his first work in The
Dial and instructed him to start a personal
journal. From 1841-44 he actually lived most of the time in Emerson’s home functioning as a tutor
to his children, an editorial assistant for the busy writer, and a
handyman.
Later, he
would enter the family pencil business, working
side by side with his employees.
He continued this, with the notable
exception of his two years at Walden, for most of the rest of his
life. He was on one hand alienated
by the distractions of day-to-day business, and on the other quite diligent. He adopted new methods of pencil
manufacture which mixed clay as a binder with graphite for improved stability and longer life, and in his last years
pioneered the use of graphite to ink typesetting machines.
He often
spoke of establishing a small subsistence farm to get
away from business and concentrate on his writing. His move to Emerson’s woodlot in April of 1845 was sort of an
experimental half-step to that
dream. Emerson agreed to allow Thoreau to build his cabin and
cultivate a small garden in exchange for clearing part of the woodlot
and continuing to do other chores for the Emerson family.
During the 26 months Thoreau spent mostly at
Walden, he worked on the manuscript of
an account of an 1839 hiking trip with his brother John and
kept a notebook, as Emerson had suggested, about his experiences and musings.
During his time there he was hardly the recluse
of later myth. He regularly
made the short walk into town.
On one trip into the village in July
of 1846, Thoreau had a chance encounter
with the local tax collector, who demanded payments for six-years-in-arrears Poll Taxes.
He refused to pay in protest to the Mexican
War and the Fugitive Slave Law and was arrested. He was released
the next day when, against his will,
his mother paid his arrearage. He later used this experience as the basis
for a lecture at the Concord
Lyceum in 1848, The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation
to Government, which he amended into the essay published by Elizabeth Peabody in the Æsthetic
Papers.
The essay came at a time when members of his circle were becoming increasingly agitated over slavery and
particularly its extension into additional territories.
The inevitability that the War with Mexico following the annexation of
Texas would bring more slave states into the Union had fueled fierce
and vocal opposition from Emerson and most of his friends. But
beyond making speeches and publishing blistering articles, they
had not put together any effective opposition to the war or impeded its
execution in the slightest.
The Lyceum
lecture, delivered as the war still raged, was effectively a gauntlet
hurled down at the feet of his closest friends charging them with hypocrisy
and complicity in not only the war but the continued existence of
slavery itself by not acting positively and personally regardless
of the consequences and costs.
Culturally
even the most radical of the Transcendentalists were inheritors of Federalism—the
conservative political doctrine that because humanity was inherently
wicked it required the constraint of government to
uphold public morality and promote common good. That
government was best when conducted sober, educated, and “disinterested”
individuals—a natural aristocracy of virtue to which all sensible
men owed allegiance. By its nature it posited a common,
over-riding morality.
Thoreau
would have none of it. It many ways he was the inheritor of
the despised democrat Thomas Jefferson. He distrusted
government—all government and held that by its very nature it was coercive
and the agency of more harm than good. It was
Thoreau, not Jefferson as commonly supposed who wrote in the published version
of the lecture that:
I heartily accept the motto,—“That
government is best which governs least;” and I should like to see it acted up
to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to
this, which I also believe,—“That government is best which governs not at all;”
and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which
they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most
governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.
In this
Thoreau went far beyond Jeffersonian agrarian democracy. Jefferson
had believed that the democratic voice of the people was the antidote to
tyranny and aristocracy and that from time to time the democratic
people would have to “water the Tree of Liberty with blood”
to restore a government that respected their rights. Thoreau had little
confidence in democracy which simply by virtue of being ruled by majorities does not also gain the virtues
of wisdom and justice. Instead, he placed his faith in individual
conscience to oppose tyranny and corruption in whatever guise.
Jefferson
was often a theoretical revolutionist. Thoreau was frank in
supporting an immediate upturning of all oppressive government.
It is “not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.” He
acknowledged that revolutions have dire consequences of suffering and
expense. But in the face of an evil as monumental as slavery, any
sacrifice and travail was worth it. “This people must cease to hold slaves, and
to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.”
While he didn’t
appeal for an armed insurrection, he never ruled one out—something
his later pacifist admirers overlook or ignore. He did not even
seem to recommend collective action of any kind. Instead he
advocated action by each moral individual to refuse to cooperate
in any meaningful way with the state which by its very existence fosters
slavery and other ills. He dismissed ordinary political action to
achieve change while obeying the law until it is changed as cowardly.
An unjust law, he argued, has no validity and a citizen owed
no allegiance to a Constitution that enshrined and enabled
slavery.
Thoreau’s
refusal to pay the poll tax was an example of that individual action done regardless
of personal consequences. The poll tax supported the machinery of
the government of Massachusetts which out of concern for
profits and business was complicit in Southern slavery.
He exhorted abolitionists to do the same regardless of the
consequences. In fact, he argued, under such circumstances prison would
be the only just home. He also argued that refusal to pay taxes
was a way in which a moral minority might effectively make revolution:
Under a government which imprisons
any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.… where the State
places those who are not with her, but against her,– the only house in a slave
State in which a free man can abide with honor.… Cast your whole vote, not a
strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while
it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible
when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men
in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to
choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would
not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the
State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the
definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.
In citing
his own experience, which cost him only one famous night in jail he
complained that, “Someone interfered and paid that tax,” a pointed jab at his
friend/benefactor Emerson.
In the
end, Thoreau acknowledged that the government in the United States was
not as bad as many systems and even had some admirable qualities.
But he insisted it was possible to do better and that there was no reason for
blind loyalty to the current system simply because others were worse.
The progress from an absolute to a
limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward
a true respect for the individual.… Is a democracy, such as we know it, the
last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a
step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There
will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to
recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its
own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.
By the
time the lecture was transformed to the printed page, the War with Mexico was
over. But the issue of the expansion of slavery that it caused was about
to boil over. The Compromise of 1850 which included the Fugitive
Slave Act was about to bring the issue of compliance with unjust laws front
and center. In Massachusetts and elsewhere Abolitionists set out to defy
the law in all of its particulars and to shelter runaway slaves, even to
rescue them from proper and legal authority. This
was often done with violence. Thoreau approved of and
supported that. For him it was Civil Disobedience in action,
as was the attempt to lead a slave rebellion by John Brown a
few years later.
The dreamy
Thoreau was not a pacifist like the Universalist Adin Ballou who
expressed similar ideas in Christian non-Resistance in 1846 and broke
with former Abolitionist associates like William Lloyd Garrison over
support of Brown and violence to end slavery. Thoreau’s essay gained
influence, especially after the publication of Walden in 1852
made him a better known figure.
As for
Thoreau himself, after leaving his cabin at Walden in September 1847 he
unsuccessfully sought a publisher for the manuscript he had been working on and
finally took Emerson’s advice to print it at his own expense.
He commissioned 1000 copies of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack
Rivers from Emerson’s publisher, but was only ever able to sell
300. He had to work for years at the pencil factory to pay off this
debt, which somewhat cooled his relationship with Emerson.
While
working at the factory, Thoreau polished his Walden journal notes into a
manuscript compressing his two year experience into a single year
for the book, divided in symbolic seasonal quarters. It was
finally published in 1854.
Thoreau
became a prolific writer and essayist. He produced books on
local history and became an increasingly skilled naturalist.
His later books on nature helped inspire the ecology movement
more than a century later. He also remained a defiant abolitionist
and became one of the few writers who publicly came to the defense of John
Brown after the failed raid at Harper’s Ferry.
He never
married, although he claimed to be an admirer of women.
Louisa May Alcott believed his lopsided features and the scraggly
neck beard he wore in his Walden period repelled women who might
otherwise have been interested. Modern biographers refer to
him as largely asexual.
He
suffered from consumption—tuberculosis—from at least 1836, which
left him in fragile health despite his frequent extended tramps
in the woods and fields. He contracted bronchitis while trying to
count tree rings of recently felled old growth trees in a cold
rainstorm in 1859 and never recovered his strength. He spent
his last years bed ridden and editing his final manuscripts.
He died
at peace with himself on May 6, 1862 at the age of 44. Bronson
Alcott arranged the funeral service where Ellery Channing read an original
elegy and Emerson, almost beside himself with grief,
delivered the eulogy. He was buried in a family plot
which was later moved to Concord’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.
Thoreau’s
reputation grew posthumously, especially after his journals and other
private writings were published in the late 19th Century. Walden
became required reading in many high school English classes
and influenced the emerging counter-culture of the 1960s.
When the Post
Office, at the height of the Hippy movement in 1967 issued a Thoreau
commemorative showing his misshapen face and scraggly appearance, it set
off a firestorm of invective from the right. Henry
David would have been proud.
The
influence of On Civil Disobedience since the writer’s death has been profound
and widespread. The great Russian writer Count Leo Tolstoy,
who held the cause of freeing the serfs as dear as Thoreau felt
Abolitionism, was an early admirer. He had also read Adin Ballou.
He was the first to graft Ballou’s pacifism onto Thoreau’s
individual revolutionary resistance.
Tolstoy in
turn was the gateway through which Mohandas Gandhi was introduced
to Thoreau. He discovered the American while organizing exploited
and oppressed Indian workers in South Africa and explicitly
acknowledged him for inspiring his first campaigns of passive resistance
in his book For Passive Resisters in 1907. Later as a nationalist out to
win independence for his people, Gandhi was not much interested in
either Tolstoy’s outright anarchism or Thoreau’s extreme skepticism of
government. It was always his aim to establish a parliamentary
democracy on the English model he had long admired. His
interpretation of Thoreau was, however, overlaid with Tolstoy’s pacifism with
more than a dollop of Ballou.
In
incorporating Thoreau’s idea of civil disobedience into his philosophy of Satyagraha Gandhi effectively
expanded the idea from individual action to a conscious and disciplined
mass movement which changed it from being theoretically revolutionary, to being a highly practical revolutionary strategy. Not without great cost and sacrifice it ultimately drove
the British out of India
and gave birth to a nation.
Martin Luther King,
Jr. famously encountered Thoreau as a seminarian in Boston. He later
described the experience in his autobiography:
During my student days I read Henry David
Thoreau’s essay On Civil Disobedience for the first time.
Here, in this courageous New Englander’s refusal to pay his taxes and his
choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery's territory
into Mexico, I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance.
Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so
deeply moved that I reread the work several times.
I became convinced that noncooperation
with evil is
as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has
been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David
Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of
a legacy of creative protest. The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil
rights movement; indeed, they are more alive than ever before. Whether
expressed in a sit-in at lunch
counters, a freedom ride into
Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in
Montgomery, Alabama, these are outgrowths of Thoreau’s insistence that evil
must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice.
Actually they are a fusion of Thoreau and Gandhi. But
echoes of Thoreau’s call to personal
responsibility echo particularly in King’s Letter from the Birmingham
Jail which like the New Englander’s Lyceum lecture boldly challenged
“good people” to lay aside both fear and the complacent view that the situation
will work itself out in the long run and make a personal commitment to moral
action.
King emphasized
Gandhian non-violence in his campaigns both out of sincere religious conviction
and out of the practical conviction
that armed violence or rebellion would so awaken the deep seated fears
of White Americans rooted in the slave rebellions that
they would crush such a rebellion
with overwhelming force and wreck terrible collective punishment
on his people. Instead he hoped to use non-violent defiance of Jim Crow laws to provoke violence,
over reaction, and mass arrests to gain the sympathy and support of the White Americans,
particularly in the North, who would pressure
Congress for basic
change. Despite his rhetoric of hoping to win over the hearts of his
immediate oppressor, King held
little hope in magically
transforming hardened Southern attitudes. As a strategy mass civil disobedience worked extremely well and led to the passage of a series of
landmark Civil Rights bills.
Perhaps the most direct heirs of Thoreau’s individual
conscious disobedience were the radical Catholic anti-nuclear, anti-Vietnam
War, and anti-draft movements epitomized by the likes of the Berrigan
Brothers and their raids on Draft
Boards and nuclear missile sites. Along with draft card
burning, wide spread refusal of
induction, and a movement to refuse to pay war taxes those
actions represented just the kind of personal action and self-sacrifice Thoreau
was talking about.
Ironically today
perhaps those who most encompass the whole of Thoreau’s message are elements of
the far right who share his almost complete distrust of government and
especially resonate with his refusal to pay taxes beginning with the Tea Party Movement before it was co-opted into an Astroturf front for billionaire
worshipers of Ayn Rand. A
lot of their quasi-libertarian rhetoric had a familiar ring. Remnants of it could even be found among those
who stormed the Capital in insurrection. Few of those, however, recognized the source.
Of course some of the movement’s “intellectuals”
know about Thoreau and may consciously have internalized his methods, the rank and file
has been taught to distrust him because his causes were
abolitionism and anti-militarism and expansionism. Moreover
he was a nature worshiping heathen who has inspired the despised environmental movement.
And the religious right has long
viewed the whole Transcendentalist movement as the beginning of the downfall
of their supposed Christian American utopia and as a nest of Eastern elitist
atheism. So Thoreau will get
no chops from them.
You can also see the
roots of civil disobedience unhitched
from the absolute pacifism of Gandhi and King in many of the world mass movements of the last
decades including all of the color coded revolutions in Eastern
Europe, the Arab Spring, in Palestinian
resistance in Israel, Western European anti-austerity movements, and
the Occupy Movement and Black Lives Matter Movement in this
country.
You have to hand it to him. One way or
another Henry David really started
something.
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